How to Choose the Right Template

Sitelas ships 42 hand-tuned archetypes across 9 categories. Two ways to land on the right one — browse the gallery yourself, or let Claude score them against your brief and pick.

Path A: Let Claude pick

The MCP tool select_template_for_brief takes structured arguments — audience, register, conversion goal, structure, density — and returns the top three scored matches. From Claude.ai:

"Find a template for a residential renovation contractor — warm and trustworthy, no online booking, hero-led."

Claude scores against the 42 archetypes, returns the top three with reasoning, and asks you to confirm. Pick one and it runs create_site_from_template to clone it.

Path B: Browse the gallery

Open /templates and filter by category. The 9 categories:

Portfolio (13 archetypes)

Personal brands and creative work. Examples: base-folio (warm editorial), cami (minimal designer), hollis (documentary photography), sawad (dark engineer), console (sticky two-column dev), obsidian (light editorial agency), dossier (sticky split-screen identity card).

Academic (6 archetypes)

CVs and research sites. tenure (multi-page CV), scholar (single-page homepage), folio (al-folio minimal), lectora (academicpages-style sidebar), thesis (single research project), lattice (research lab).

Food (4 archetypes)

beacon (all-day café), juniper (dark fine-dining), latte (warm cafe with menu), midnight-creative (editorial chef's-counter).

Business (10 archetypes)

Services and trades. compass (oxblood + peach), gable (renovation contractor), hatch (boutique tech recruiting), ironclad (commercial GC), lotus (wellness studio), marigold (preschool), meridian (solo expert), park (modernist consultant), riverbend (family medicine), whitford (law firm).

SaaS (4 archetypes)

atrium (help center), codex (three-column developer docs), flagship (section-stack landing), nimbus (modern AI/dev-tools landing).

Content (2 archetypes)

airwave (podcast/creator) and narrative (editorial blog).

Real estate, events, document

reyes (broker), summit (conference landing with countdown), vitae (printable CV).

Templates are starting points, not constraints

Pick the closest match, then ask Claude (or the editor chat) to push it the rest of the way. Add pages, swap sections, change layouts, rewrite copy — every part of every template is patchable via patch_nodes, patch_fixture, add_page, insert_nodes.

Still not sure?

Pick three you like, clone all three (free up to 3 sites), and decide once you can see them with real content.