What's a CMS?

In the world of web design, CMS stands for content management system, and as the name suggests, it's a system for managing the content of your website.

CMSs were invented for two reasons:

  1. To help "non-technical" people maintain their websites
  2. To help everyone publish new content within a consistent design, anytime

 

What your CMS can do

Your CMS allows you to edit most any existing content on your website, including text (or "copy"), images, buttons, links, etc.

It also allows you to create some new pages through Collections, which is typically used for blogs, services, testimonials or staff.

 

Getting Started

 

Taking control of your beautiful new website starts with accessing its built-in content management system (CMS for short). And that process usually starts with an email from us with a link to set up your account. 

When you click the link, you’ll be taken to your website’s CMS — which, at first, will look just like your new website. Except now, you should see a grey bar across the bottom, with a simple form asking you to set a new password.

 

 

Now, your content management system should look just like your website — except there’s a toolbar with two browser-like tabs labeled Pages and Collections, plus a series of icons.

For now, take a moment to bookmark this page so you can easily return to it later. In most browsers, you can bookmark a page by holding Command/Control + B.

Otherwise, you can always return to your site’s content management system by simply typing the URL, then adding /?edit to the end. 

So if your website’s URL is yourwebsite.com, just go to yourwebsite.com/?edit to log in and start editing.

When you return to your site later, you may see a little pencil icon in the lower right, which you can click to hop into your CMS. Rest assured that only those with access to the CMS will see this icon!

If you've logged out of the Editor, you will need to log back in with the email and the password that you set when creating the account.

With the basics out of the way, let's dig into the CMS itself.