Quick start

You've installed Lettern and signed in. This tour walks you through the five things you'll do most: find your way, edit a page, set your style, add content and publish.

#1. Find your way around

After signing in you land on the Dashboard: what changed recently, and whether your live site is up to date.

The sidebar on the left is where you work. Under Content are your pages, your other content, media, menus, forms and globals; under Design, the design system, templates, components and collections. Settings, the gear next to your name (⌘⇧,), holds what you set up once: your account, the site's general settings, email, users and roles, and the settings of each plugin.

A few shortcuts save a lot of clicking:

#2. Edit a page

Open Pages and click Home. The page opens exactly as visitors see it, and you edit it right there.

• Click any text and type to change it.
• Point between two blocks and press the + that appears to add something new: text, an image, a button, columns, a form.
• Select a block to see its settings on the right, under Content, Design and Interact.

Changes save as you go. Nobody sees them until you publish.

Learn more in Writing and Block settings.

#3. Set your style

Open Design System, under Design in the sidebar. This is where your site's colors, fonts and spacing live, with a live preview on the right.

Every block on every page uses these values. Change your main color once, and the whole site follows: there's nothing to update page by page. See Design system.

#4. Add your own kind of content

Pages aren't the only content a site has. A restaurant has dishes, an agency has projects, a blog has posts. Each kind of content is a collection, with its own fields.

Open Collections, under Design, to make one, say Dishes with a price, a description and a photo. Then everyone fills in a simple form, and your pages show the dishes in your design.

See Collections to set one up.

#5. Publish

When you're happy, press Publish. The page goes live straight away: there's no deploy step and no cache to clear. Publish Site on the Dashboard publishes everything at once.

#6. Work from the workspace

Press ⌘J, or New Chat at the top of the sidebar, and the workspace opens beside the page. Type / for a command, such as New Page or Add to Menu, or type a few words to search the whole admin. Every answer is something to act on: open it, publish it, undo it.

With the assistant set up, ask in plain words in the same place, for example: "Add a pricing section with three plans to the home page." It works in the admin just as you do, and asks before anything that goes live or is hard to undo. Lettern works fully without it.

#Where next

• How Lettern works explains the few ideas everything is built on.
• Templates change the frame around your pages: the header, the footer, the layout.
• Users and roles lets your clients and team in, with the right access.