Opening the editor
Go to your dashboard, find the site, and click Edit. That opens the site with the editing tools around it.
Always open it from the dashboard
The screen
Your site fills the middle. It is the real site, not a picture of it — what you see is what visitors get. The tools sit around the edges.

A strip across the top, when it matters
Down the left
Four buttons. Each opens a panel over the site.
| Home | Your site's address, your plan, the icon in the browser tab, a shortcut to Search & SEO settings, a read-only Brand snapshot of the colours your site actually uses — which Claude reads to keep new work consistent — and the two ways back: Reset to published, and Undo last publish. |
| Pages | Every page and post on your site. Add, duplicate, delete and publish them one at a time, and change each page's settings: its title, its address, and how it shows up in Google. |
| Theme | Colours and fonts — for the whole site at once. |
| AI | A chat panel. Ask for a change in plain words and it makes it for you. |
Along the bottom
Everything to do with saving and going live. On the left it tells you whether you have unsaved work.

The pencil and eye switch between editing and Live — Live hides all the editing chrome so you see exactly what a visitor sees, without leaving the editor. The two screen icons switch the canvas between desktop and phone width, so you can check both without resizing your browser.
When you click something
A small toolbar appears over it, and a panel opens on the right. The toolbar is for doing things — move it, copy it, delete it. The right panel is for settings — where a link goes, what an image says, how big the text is.

Every button on that toolbar
Left to right. Hover any of them and the tooltip tells you the same thing, along with its keyboard shortcut.

| The name on the left | What this block sits inside, shown by name — usually the section it belongs to. Click it to select that instead. Useful when you clicked something small and actually wanted the whole band it lives in. |
| The two arrows | Move this block one place earlier or later among the things beside it. They point the way it will actually go: up and down when things are stacked, left and right when they sit in a row. Hold Option (Alt) with the arrow keys to do the same thing without the mouse. |
| Add inside | Put a new block within this one. Only appears on blocks that hold other things — a section, a row, a column — because nothing else has an inside. |
| Add after | Put a new block directly below or beside this one, as a neighbour rather than a child. |
| The gear | Opens the settings panel on the right. |
| Duplicate | Makes a copy right after this one — the quickest way to add another card, row or list item that matches. ⌘D (Ctrl+D). |
| Delete | Removes it. Backspace does the same, and Undo brings it back. |
Some blocks add one more button of their own: a photo gets upload, a button or link gets a way to follow where it points, and a table gets add row and add column. A block you have positioned freely also gets a move handle to drag it around.
Reaching something stacked underneath
Moving around with the arrow keys
Hold Option (or Alt) with the same arrows and you move the block itself instead of the selection — the same thing the arrows on its toolbar do.
Changing what's there
Your header and footer are shared
Text
Click the words and type. That is all. It works anywhere text appears — headings, paragraphs, buttons, menus.
Photos
Click the photo, then use the upload button on its toolbar. Pick a file and it goes straight in.
Colours and fonts
These belong to the whole site rather than to the thing you clicked, so they live in the Theme panel — see Colours & fonts.
The little icon in the browser tab
That icon is your favicon. It belongs to the site itself rather than to a version of it, so it changes the moment you save instead of waiting for you to publish. That is why it is not in the editor with the rest of the design: you set it on your dashboard, on the site’s own page, next to its web address. The Home panel in the editor has an Address & site icon button that takes you straight there.
It starts as your site’s initials on a coloured tile. Change the letters (an emoji works too), change the colour, or upload your own — PNG, JPG, WEBP, SVG or ICO. There is a reset if you want the initials back.
Tabs cache it hard
Spacing, size and alignment
Click the thing, then use the panel on the right. The block’s own settings come first. Finer ones are under Advanced, at the bottom. These are controls, not typing — pick a size, nudge the spacing.
When a setting seems to do nothing
The panel tells you why. If another setting wins, you’ll see Not in effect under it. Click Use this instead to switch.
Some settings only work for visitors, like autoplay or opening a link in a new tab. Those say Takes effect on the live site. A blue dot marks a setting you changed. Click the dot to put it back.
Making it look different on a phone
At the top of Advanced there are three buttons — All, Tablet, Desktop. They decide which screen size your next change applies to.
All is the starting point, and the one that matters. A size or a spacing set there is used at every width, phones included. Switch to Tablet or Desktop and your change applies from that width up, leaving smaller screens alone. So set it on All first. Reach for the other two only when a big screen needs something different.
Not the same as the two icons at the bottom
Hover effects and scroll animations
Two more things worth knowing about, in the panel.
Hover, at the top of Advanced on buttons, links, cards and photos, sets what changes when someone points at something: a background, a text colour, a border. You also set how long the change takes. It is what makes a button feel like a button.
Animation makes a block arrive as the visitor scrolls to it. Fade in, slide up, scale up, blur into focus, and a few more. There is a play button to try it without scrolling. Used on one or two blocks, it draws the eye. Used on all of them, it makes the site feel slow. Start with the section you most want read.
Adding a block
Click something near where you want the new block. Its toolbar has two add buttons: one puts the block inside what you clicked, one puts it after. A list of blocks slides out to choose from.
Your collections are at the top of that list, by name — see showing a collection on another page.
Asking for a change instead
Open AI on the left and describe what you want. “Make the hero darker. Rewrite this in a warmer tone.” It edits the page for you, and you review it before it goes anywhere.
Colours & fonts
The Theme panel holds the decisions that belong to the site rather than to one page: your palette and your two fonts. There is one theme per site — no per-page variations. Spacing, shadows and most corners belong to each section, so you change those on the section itself.

| Saved looks | Only if your site has any. Your AI assistant can save a look by name; click one here to apply its colours and fonts. |
| Brand colours | Primary, the text on it, Secondary, Accent, Background, and the colour of cards and panels. Click a swatch to open your system colour picker, or type or paste any CSS colour beside it. Transparency is kept when you pick a new colour. |
| Text & borders | Your three text shades — normal, secondary and muted — plus the line colour used for borders and dividers. |
| Typography | A heading font and a body font. Search the whole font library, with a live sample in your colours above them. |
| More settings | The highlight when someone selects text, the colour of form errors, square or rounded corners on components such as search boxes and badges, a window frame, and how in-page links scroll. |
When a font change misses some elements
Templates often set a font directly on individual elements. When you pick a new font, elements set to the old theme font move with it. An element set to a different font keeps it, because that may be deliberate, such as a monospaced label. A font set inside rich text or a collection item stays too.
The panel counts those under each font, in amber: “30 elements use a different font.” Next to it is Apply theme font to all, which clears those individual settings so your choice takes effect everywhere.

The counts are for the whole site, not the page you happen to be on — which is why the number is often larger than you expect.
That button also clears deliberate choices
Colours can be overridden the same way
An element given its own colour in the right-hand panel keeps it, and a theme change slides underneath without touching it. Unlike fonts there’s no warning and no “apply to all” — so if one heading stubbornly stays the old colour, select it and clear the colour set on the element itself.
Reset goes back to your last save
A Reset button appears at the top of the panel once you’ve changed anything. It returns the theme to how it was when you last saved — not to the template’s original colours. Save, and it disappears: from then on the way back is ⌘Z, or Reset to published in the Home panel.
Instant here, not yet anywhere else
The AI chat
The AI button on the left opens a chat that edits the site you have open. Ask it to rewrite a headline, warm up the colours, add a pricing page or swap a photo, and it makes the change.

| Words and layout | Rewrite copy, restyle or move blocks, add a section, rebuild a page from a template. |
| Look and feel | Apply a palette, match your brand, change fonts, rewrite every page's copy in one go. |
| Pages | Add, rename, duplicate or delete a page — renaming repoints your links, same as doing it by hand. |
| Lists | Create a collection, then add, edit and remove the entries in it. |
| Pictures | Find stock photos, pull an image in from a URL, or replace the images on a page. |
| A second opinion | Screenshot a page, critique the design, or run a health check over the site. |
It can't put anything live
Point it at something
Shift-click elements on the page before you type. They appear as chips above the box, and the chat works on those instead of guessing — “make these bigger” lands where you meant. Remove a chip with its ×, or clear them all.
It saves as it goes
There is no “accept these changes” step. Each edit is written to your draft as it happens, and a green Changes card at the end of the reply tells you what it did — “Edited 3 items on Home · Added a Pricing section”.
⌘Z won't take back the AI's work
Save your own work before you ask
What it costs
Every reply is metered against your AI credits, and the balance sits in the panel header, where you can watch it go down. Every account starts with $10 of them — once, on any plan, and they never expire. When that runs out you top up; a subscription doesn’t refill it. Working through the Claude connector instead doesn’t touch this balance — that path costs you nothing here on any plan, because your agent’s own provider bills those tokens. Only this panel spends credits.
Stopping a reply doesn't refund it
The conversation isn't kept
Adding pages & posts
Both live in the Pages panel. Ordinary pages are listed first. Below them are your collections — blog posts, projects, menu items, whatever your site keeps a list of. Open a collection and its listing page is the first row, above the entries it lists.

A new page
- 1Click New page.
- 2Give it a name. The web address fills itself in — change it if you like.
- 3Click Create. You land on the new page, ready to write.
New pages don't join your menu
Putting a page in the menu
The quickest way is to copy a link that is already there, because it already carries your menu’s styling.
- 1Click a link in your header — About, say. The blue pill reads Nav Item.
- 2Press
⌘Dto duplicate it. A second copy appears next to it. - 3With the copy selected, open the right panel. Change Label to the words you want in the menu, and URL to the page’s address —
/services, exactly as the Pages panel shows it. - 4To move it along the menu, press
⌥↑or⌥↓— earlier or later among its neighbours.
Your header is shared, so the link appears on every page at once. The same works in the footer.
A new collection — a blog, a portfolio, a job board
A collection is a set of pages that share a shape. Every blog post looks like the others; so does every project. Make one and you get the listing page and the shape of an entry together. Adding the second post is then just typing.
- 1In the Pages panel, click New collection.
- 2Pick what it is — Blog, Portfolio, Jobs, or Custom for a plain title-and-body one you shape yourself.
- 3Name it. The name becomes the address — “Field notes” lives at
/field-notes/. - 4You land on its new listing page, with one example entry already in it to edit or delete.
Each kind arrives with the fields it needs. A blog post has a date, a cover image and a body. A job has a team and a location. You are not filling in a database — you are editing a page that already looks right.
The listing page is made for you
A new post, project or listing
- 1Find the collection in the Pages panel and click Add.
- 2Give it a name — that is the only thing it asks for.
- 3You land on its own page, laid out like the others, with the fields empty and waiting.
Empty fields show as dashed boxes so you can find them. Click one and type. Leave any of them empty for as long as you like — nothing is public until you publish it.

Editing an existing item
To change a post you already made, open it first.
- 1In the Pages panel, click the item nested under its collection.
- 2Or find its card wherever the collection shows on your site, and click the small open-page icon on its toolbar.
- 3You land on the item’s own page, ready to edit.
From there, click a field and type — a title, a name, a price — the same as any other text on the page. A field that mixes your words with fixed text, like a caption, opens in the right panel instead, so typing can’t overwrite the fixed part.
A card selects the list, not that one item
Showing a collection on another page
Your posts already have their own page — the listing Sitelas made when you created the collection. To show them somewhere else too, like three recent projects on your home page:
- 1Click whatever the list should sit under or inside, and use Add block on its toolbar.
- 2Pick your collection from Collections, at the top of the list.
- 3It arrives as its own section below the one you were in, showing real items, laid out like the ones on its own page.


Then click it and use the right panel to make it yours: Show at most for how many, Order for how they’re sorted — drag them yourself, newest or oldest first, or by one of your own fields — Cards across and Space between cards for the layout, and Show on each card to hide fields you don’t want here. The same collection can be a short strip on one page and the full listing on another.
To change how the cards look, Card design offers four simple arrangements and Browse designs, a library of card designs from our templates — each one previewed as your own card, in your colours and fonts. Card style adjusts the border or shadow, corners, padding, photo shape, text alignment and hover effect for every card at once. As designed always puts the original card back, and Edit card design opens the card itself for anything else.

Some controls only show up for some layouts
Pick the collection, not a blank list
Reordering
Drag a post by the grip on its toolbar to change the order it appears in on your site. This only works while that collection’s Order is set to manual — pick Newest first or another order instead and the cards arrange themselves.
Renaming and deleting
Every row has a ⋯ menu: page settings, duplicate, open a preview, delete.
Renaming a page moves any pages beneath it and repoints every link that pointed at the old address, so nothing breaks. The old address keeps working and forwards to the new one.
Deleting warns you first
How collections work
A collection is a list of things that share a shape — projects, posts, menu items, job openings. You describe the shape once, and every entry you add fills in the same blanks.
The part that surprises people: you don’t build a page per entry. A collection has one template, and every item is rendered through it. Ten projects is one page design and ten sets of content, not ten pages.

In the panel, collections sit in their own group below your ordinary pages. Each one shows its name, the path its items live under, and how many it holds. Open the arrow to see the items themselves.
| The path | Every item’s address starts here. A project collection on /projects/ gives you /projects/long-gate-bridge. |
| The fields | The blanks every item fills in — a title, a photo, a description, a date, whatever the list needs. Same fields for every item, which is what lets one template lay them all out. |
| The template | The single page design each item is poured into. Edit it once and every item changes with it. See Designing the item page. |
| The listing page | The page that shows them all as cards — /projects for the example above. Made for you when the collection is created. |
Editing the template changes every item
The path settles once you publish
Add gives you an item, not a page
Fields, galleries & repeating rows
To change what a collection’s items hold, open the ⋯ menu on the collection in the Pages panel and choose Edit fields. You can add a field, rename one, make it required or remove it.

| Photo gallery | Several photos on one item, each with a description. Add, replace and reorder them in the item’s fields. |
| Repeating rows | A list you shape yourself, such as a menu, a schedule or a spec sheet. Give the field its columns, then add as many rows as the item needs. |
To fill them in, open the item’s ⋯ menu in the Pages panel and choose All fields. Every field opens on the right, including ones the page doesn’t show yet. To show a list on the page, add a Repeat block to the item page.

Renaming is safe. Types are fixed
A date field stores a date such as 2026-09-02 and shows it to visitors as “Sep 2, 2026”, in your site’s language.
On a long list, use Filter by… in the Pages panel to show only the items with a given choice, tag or yes/no value.

Your blog gets a feed
/feed.xml on your site, so readers can follow new entries. Items you hide or keep out of search are left out, and so is a site kept out of search.Designing the item page
Every item in a collection shares one page design. To change it, open the ⋯ menu on the collection and choose Edit item page layout. A bar at the bottom of the screen reminds you that you are editing the layout, not one item.

Words in double braces, like {{title}}, are filled in from each item. Typing over one replaces it with fixed text that every item will show.
- 1Change the layout as you would any page.
- 2Save, then publish the site. Item pages change for visitors when you publish.
- 3Choose Done on the bar to go back to your site.
| Previous / Next | Links to the items before and after this one, in the order your listing page shows them. Hidden and unpublished items are skipped. |
| Repeat | Shows what’s inside it once per entry of a gallery, repeating rows or tags field. Set which field in its settings. Inside, use {{url}} and {{alt}} for a photo, {{column}} for a row’s column and {{value}} for a tag. |
Other languages
Your site can appear in more than one language. Each language gets its own addresses: your /about page in French is /fr/about. Pages share one layout, so moving a section moves it in every language.
- 1In the Pages panel, click Languages.
- 2Add a language by its code, such as
fr,deorpt-br. - 3Pick what to translate: a page, the header, the footer, an item or an item page layout. Type the translation under each original, then click Save translation.
- 4Add a Language Switcher block to your header, from Add Block, so visitors can change language.
- 5Publish. Translations stay private until you do.


| A word left blank | Shows the original. To remove a translation, clear its box and save. |
| A page or item not translated yet | Has no address in that language. Its /fr link sends visitors to the original, and the switcher doesn’t offer it. |
| Search engines | Translated pages join your sitemap, and the language versions of a page are linked together for you. |
What the form can't translate
translate tool, and can also remove a language. Removing one keeps its words, in case you add it back.A language needs its address free
fr on a site with a page at /fr. Once a language is added, new pages can’t use its address either.Sub-pages
A sub-page is an ordinary page that lives underneath another one, in its address and in the list. Pick Add sub-page on /work and call it People, and you get /work/people — indented under Work in the panel, so the shape of your site is visible at a glance.
Nothing else changes: a sub-page is edited, published and deleted exactly like any other page. The nesting is about the address and the way it reads, not a different kind of thing.
Still ordinary pages, still counted
Addresses & renaming
A page carries two names that are easy to confuse, and Page settings puts them side by side so you can see which is which. Open it from the page’s ⋯ menu in the Pages panel, or from Edit next to the page’s address when the page itself is selected.

| Title | What shows in the browser tab and in search results. Change it freely — nothing breaks. |
| URL | The address itself, the part after your domain. The full address is spelled out underneath as you type. |
| Your menu label | Neither of the above. The words in your navigation are their own thing — edit them in the header, on the page. |
It tells you before you commit, not after
The address is checked as you type, so a name that can’t work is refused here rather than after a save. Save stays greyed out until it is happy.

What a rename actually does
Changing an address has consequences beyond the one page, so the view lists them before you agree to them.

- 1Your sub-pages come along — but only if you let them. The tick box names every one and shows exactly where it lands. Untick it and they stay where they are.
- 2Links are repointed — anything on your site pointing at the old address is updated for you: your menu, your footer, a button halfway down another page.
- 3The old address keeps working — anyone arriving on it is forwarded to the new one, so a link someone saved or shared doesn’t die.
- 4Nothing is public until you publish — the rename sits in your draft like any other change.
Your home page keeps its address
Search & sharing for one page
Every page can say how it should appear in Google, and what shows up when someone posts its link on Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or X. Open Page settings and expand Search & sharing.

| Search title | The blue headline in a Google result. Leave it empty and the page title is used, followed by your site name. Around 60 characters shows in full. |
| Search description | The short text under that headline. Leave it empty and the first paragraph on the page is used. Google shows about 160 characters. |
| Share image | The picture on a shared link — a full image address starting with https://. Leave it empty to use your site’s share image, or the page’s first photo when there isn’t one. 1200 × 630 works everywhere. |
| Language | Only for a page you wrote by hand in another language — an English version of a French site, say at /en. To translate your whole site, see Other languages. Sitelas usually detects it from the page’s text; pick it here if it gets it wrong. Search engines then link the language versions of the page together. |
| Hide this page from search engines | Keeps the page out of search results and out of your sitemap. Anyone with the link can still open it. |
These go live when you publish
Settings for the whole site are on your dashboard
Forms & submissions
Putting a form on a page
- 1Click + where you want it and pick Form.
- 2It arrives as a working contact form — name, email, message and a send button — so it’s usable before you touch anything.
- 3Click it, and the panel on the right lists its fields. Add, remove, rename and reorder them there, along with the button text and the thank-you message.
Every submission is captured — no third-party form service to wire up:
- Your inbox. Read and reply to submissions from the dashboard, or ask Claude (“any new messages this week?”). Each submission also becomes a contact with its own activity history.
- An email when one arrives. We email the account owner as soon as someone fills in a form, so a lead doesn’t wait for you to check the dashboard. Hitting Reply reaches the person who wrote in. It’s on by default and switched per site from Submissions in the dashboard, or from the link at the bottom of the email. Turning it off stops the email only — submissions still arrive and are still saved.
- Webhook forwarding. A form can POST each submission to your own URL the moment it arrives — compose with Zapier, n8n, your CRM, Slack, anything. Click the form, and in the panel on the right paste an HTTPS address into Forward to webhook — or ask Claude to set it for you.
- File attachments. Uploads go to private Sitelas storage and are shared as durable, signed download links — never public URLs. You set the largest file each field accepts, up to 25 MB, on either plan. Uploads count toward your site's storage — 100 MB on Free, 2 GB on Pro.
- Spam protection. Cloudflare Turnstile guards every public form path.
Every submission is always captured, stored and forwarded to your webhook — on every plan, with no limit on receiving them. What the plan sets is how many you can READ each month: 5 on Free, and 500 on Pro, per site. Past that, a Free site still shows that a submission arrived and when, and unlocks the contents the moment you upgrade — including ones from earlier months. The notification email follows the same line: past the allowance it tells you one arrived and when, without the sender or the message.
Saving your work
One Save button, for everything. Text, photos, colours, new pages, a post’s headline — it all goes together.
The bottom left tells you where you stand: Unsaved changes means you have work in the editor that isn’t written down yet. Saved means it is.
Saving is not the same as going live
Discard throws away everything you haven’t saved and puts the page back to its last saved state.
If Claude changed the site while you were editing
Going live
Look before you leap
Preview opens your saved draft at a private address. It is safe to send to anyone — it is hidden from search engines. Save first, or the preview won’t have your latest changes.
Publishing the whole site
Click Publish site the first time, and Publish changes after that. Confirm, and your draft becomes the live site. Anything unsaved is saved for you first.
This never brings back a page or post you deliberately took down — only pages that were already live, or new work, come along.

Publishing one page
Once your site is live, you can put a single page or post live on its own — from its ⋯ menu in the Pages panel, or from the item itself on the page.
You are offered exactly one action, whichever one applies:
| Never been live | Publish this page — put it up |
| Live, but you have changed it | Publish changes — send the new version |
| Live and up to date | Unpublish this page — take it down |
For a post the wording follows your collection, so it reads Unpublish this project or Publish this case study.

Taking a page down doesn't delete it
You can see it from the canvas too. A post that isn’t on your live site is dimmed and tagged Unpublished where it appears in a list, and its own page says the same just above the bottom bar.
Switch the editor to the eye (live preview), or open your preview link, and you see your site as it will be once you publish. A post you took down is gone from both — publishing won’t bring it back. A post you just wrote is still there, because publishing will put it live, and seeing it first is the whole point.
Undoing things
| Discard | Bottom bar. Throws away everything you haven't saved yet. |
| Reset to published | Home panel. Throws away your whole draft and matches what's live. |
| Undo last publish | Home panel. Puts the previous published version back. One step only. |
⌘Z undoes your last edit in the editor, as many times as you need, right up until you save.
⌘Z doesn't reach into a post's own fields
Keyboard shortcuts
⌘Z | Undo |
⌘⇧Z | Redo |
⌘D | Duplicate |
↑ ↓ ← → | Move the selection: up to whatever contains this block, down into it, left and right between the blocks beside it |
⌥↑ ⌥↓ ⌥← ⌥→ | Move the block itself, the same as the arrows on its toolbar |
⌫ / Del | Delete |
Esc | Leave the text you're typing in, then deselect |
On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl wherever ⌘ appears.
Keep reading
Start here
What Sitelas is, how to begin, and how a site gets from idea to live.
Your dashboard
Sites, form submissions, search & SEO, your business in Google, verifying your site with Google, custom domains, AI credits, plans and limits, your account and sign-in.
Agents & MCP
Connect Claude or ChatGPT, what your agent can do, the tool reference, and API keys for headless access.
Trust & support
How your data is handled, how the platform is secured, common questions, and how to reach us.