Building your parish website

Every parish, diocese and school gets a public website. You build it from the Website menu.

Your first visit

A new site starts with Make your website on the Overview: three short questions, then a finished set of draft pages to check and one Publish my site button. See Making your website on day one. A site that was already started but has no name yet shows a short Quick setup instead, asking for the site's name, a short line under it, and a pair of colours. You can skip either and come back, and you can change every answer later.

After that, the Overview shows a setup list that ticks itself off as you go: the site title, a tagline, your logo, a browser tab icon, your colours, your first published page, a contact form, your clergy and staff, the top menu and the footer. There's also a Take the builder tour button.

What each part does

• Overview. Your site, and what is left to do.
• Pages. The pages of your site. Add one, edit one, publish it. The tabs are All pages, Front page, Sacrament pages and My blocks. See Making a page from a template.
• News. Articles for your site, with How news looks for the article pages.
• Photos and files. Your photos and documents, and Photo albums for visitors.
• Forms. Contact and other forms, and what people sent. See Your Contact page and its form.
• People. Your parish priest's profile, and your clergy and staff.
• Look. Colours, fonts, logo and banner photo. See Colours, fonts, logo and banner.
• Menus. The menu across the top: which pages it shows and in what order.
• Footer. The words at the foot of every page, your social pages and the copyright line.
• Site details. Your name as people say it, your address, phone and email, and the year you were founded. Change a fact here once and every page that shows it follows.
• Web address. The address people type, or your own address.
• Settings. A holding page while you get ready, an announcement across the top, search engines, emails from your forms, and old web addresses.

A good order for a new site

1. Fill in Site details with your real address, phone and email.
2. Set your Look: colours, logo and banner.
3. Start your pages from a template, then edit them. See Editing a section on the page.
4. Add your priest's profile and your staff under People.
5. Check Menus, then publish. See Publishing and drafts.

While you work, you can turn on the holding page under Settings, so visitors see a short notice instead of a half-finished site.

Who can use it

The parish priest, the parish administrator and the parish secretary can edit a parish website. For a diocese, the bishop, the vicar general, the chancellor, the communications director and the bishop's secretary can. See Your role and what you can do.

Keep it up to date

A few minutes a month keeps the site trustworthy: refresh the banner for the season, keep Mass times current, and check your contact details are right.

New to the console? There's a short guided tour of the parish tools. It starts by itself the first time you open the console, and the "Take a quick tour" button in the corner replays it whenever you like.