Building your first website

You pick a starting point, say a little about your business, and get a real site with real pages that you can then change however you like. It takes a few minutes, and you cannot break anything.

The short version

• Press New Website and give it a name. You can change it later.
• Pick a starter design, or start from an empty page.
• Say what your business does, in a sentence or two. This is optional.
• You get a full site. Every part of it is editable.
• Nothing is public until you publish, so take your time.

Choosing a starting point

A starter design is a complete site with pages, sections and styling already in place. Browse them and pick whichever is closest to what you want. Closest is good enough, because we rewrite it for your business rather than leaving you to replace the placeholder text yourself.

Start from scratch gives you an empty page. Choose this if you already know exactly what you want and would rather build it up than change somebody else's layout.

Telling us about the business

Once you have chosen a design, you can describe your business and we rewrite that design around it. All of this is optional. A design taken exactly as it comes is a perfectly good place to start, and you can rewrite anything later by hand.

What it does. A couple of sentences in plain language. What you sell, who buys it, what makes you different, anything specific worth saying. "A family dental practice offering cleanings, whitening and braces. Good with nervous patients, open Saturdays. Been on Bridge Street for 20 years."

Specifics are what make the difference. "We do plumbing" produces a site about plumbing. The version above produces one that mentions Saturdays, nervous patients and twenty years on Bridge Street, because those are the things a customer choosing between you and somebody else actually reads.

How it should feel. A few words. "Clean, calm, professional". "Warm and a bit playful". This steers tone and styling rather than content.

Brand color. If you have one, set it. Everything else is worked out from it, so there is nothing to match up by hand.

What you get

A working site with several pages, written for your business, with a header, a footer and consistent styling throughout. Not a wireframe and not a placeholder.

It will not be exactly right, and it is not supposed to be. It is a starting point that is already about you, which is a much easier thing to edit than an empty page or somebody else's demo content.

What to do next

Open the editor and read your own site. Fix the things that are wrong about your business first, before touching anything visual. Wrong opening hours matter more than a heading you would have worded differently.

Then pick your address and publish. Getting something live and imperfect beats polishing something nobody can see, and you can keep editing after it is live.

You cannot break it

Every page keeps a version history, so any change can be put back. Nothing you do in the editor is visible to anyone until you publish. And building a second site to try a different direction is always an option.