Build a website

1Look through the templates before you pick one

Click Website in the Tools rail. Under Start from a template (Add another set of pages once you have a site) there are nine cards. Each shows the part of one page that sets that template apart, such as its menu or its people directory, then a line naming its type and look, then the pages it creates. Templates you have saved sit above them, under Your templates. Click one to open it.

It opens on Overview: the front page, the page the card showed, and a page for one item, side by side. Click any of them to see it whole. Down the left is every page the template creates, each with what it is for: Directory, Profile, Location and so on. Click through them. The first five are shops, and they differ most on their category and product pages: a filter rail down the side suits a few thousand items, a row of chips across the top suits a few hundred. The other four are Professional services firm, Restaurant or venue, Branch network and Real estate agency, and those differ in what they list.

Click Use this template when you have decided. A bar names each step (creating the pages, opening your front page), and the front page opens in the editor when it is done. It takes a couple of seconds.

Clicking Use this template again on a template you already added opens its front page instead of adding a second copy. Once every page it made is deleted or archived, it adds them again.

A page marked Optional has Add this page under it. Untick it to leave that page out, and links to it on the other pages are removed.

2Save your site as a template

On Website, click Save as a template beside Save this site as a template. Change the Template name if you want to, and untick any page under Pages to include that should not be in it. The header, footer and anything else those pages share come with them.

If your business goes by another name, type it under Other names your business goes by, separated by commas. Click Check what is taken out.

Under Your business's name is every place your name was found, and under Details that identify your business every email address, phone number, ABN, ACN, bank detail and street address. Ticked ones are replaced: your name with the name of whoever uses the template, a detail with an invented one such as name@example.com. Untick one to keep it as it is.

Links to pages you left out are removed from the template. Click Include beside one to add that page instead. Uploaded pictures are always replaced with generated ones, and the people, articles or products your pages list come without any of your records.

Click Save template. It appears under Your templates, and Use this template creates its pages as drafts like any other template. To remove it, open it and click Delete template. Pages already made from it stay.

A saved template is listed only in the workspace that saved it, and in any other workspace where you are an admin too, marked Saved in with the workspace it came from.

3Change a saved template

On Website, open the template under Your templates and click Edit template.

Under About the template, change the Template name, Who it suits, the One line description and the Sample business name, which is what its pages call the business in the template picker. Picture style decides the generated pictures, and Colours are the nine colours its pages use.

Under Pages, change a page's title, its Role and its Summary. The arrows move a page up or down, which is the order the picker lists them in. Tick Optional to let whoever installs the template leave that page out. The front page cannot be optional. Click a page to preview it on the right.

Click Edit page beside a page, or Edit beside a shared section under Shared sections, to change what is on it in the website editor. It saves as you go. A picture there is a generated one: Use a generated picture adds one and Another swaps it. In a link field, the template's own pages are listed as you type.

Under Sample records, choose a ready-made template in Take sample records from to fill the lists on your pages, such as twelve people or a dozen products. The one marked its pictures match is the one your site was built from, and suits it best. Untick a list to leave it empty. Your own records never come with a template.

Click Save changes for the settings. Then click Check it installs to see the pages and addresses installing it in this workspace would create, without creating anything.

4Share a template by link

Open the template with Edit template, save any changes, and click Check and share under Share by link.

It is checked for email addresses, phone numbers, ABNs and ACNs, bank details, street addresses, reference numbers, ids from a workspace, uploaded pictures and the names of businesses on Diract. If any is found, nothing is shared and each one is listed with where it is. Change it in the editor, then click Check and share again.

Once it passes, a link appears. Click Copy link and send it. Whoever opens it, signed in, sees every page, what the check found, and Use this template, which adds the pages to their own workspace as drafts. Only an admin can install it.

It is checked again every time somebody installs it, so a change that adds one of those details stops installs until it is taken out. Click Stop sharing to turn the link off. Sharing again makes a new link.

5Update your pages when their template changes

On Website, open the template your pages came from and click Update my pages. Nothing changes yet: it lists what updating would do.

Pages under Changed in the template and not by you, to be updated get the template's new version, and pages under New in the template, to be added are created. Click Update pages to do both, or Cancel.

A page you have changed is never replaced. It is listed under Changed by you, left as they are, even if you only changed its title. A page you deleted or archived is not added back, a page the template no longer has is kept, and a page somebody has open in the editor is left until they close it.

Pages added from a template before 14 September 2026 are listed under Added before updates existed, left as they are. Updating still adds that template's new pages.

An update never adds, changes or removes your people, listings, articles or other records.

6Replace the sample people, articles and listings

The firm, restaurant, branch network and agency templates list records rather than fixed words: people, services, offices, articles, events, dishes, listings. A record is edited on its own screen, not on the page. On Website, click Open Content under Content.

Pick a collection on the left, such as People or Property listings. Click Edit beside a record, change its fields, and click Save. Add person (or Add listing, Add article) starts a new one. The bin icon deletes a record, after asking.

The eye icon beside a record publishes or unpublishes it, and the count under each collection says how many are published. The sample records are published when the template is installed, so delete the ones you have not replaced before you publish the pages, or they are listed on your live site. A record you add starts as a draft and appears nowhere until you publish it.

If you already keep the same person in one of your own tables, use Linked to your own records while editing: choose the table under Choose one of your tables, search for them, and click their name. Copy details across then fills the website record from yours. It copies once. A later change to your own record does not reach the website until you click it again.

7Put your own products in the shop

The five shop templates, and the restaurant template's shop, list products rather than fixed words. On Website, click Open Content under Content, then pick Products on the left.

Click Edit beside a product, change its fields, and click Save. Add product starts a new one as a draft, which appears nowhere until you publish it with the eye icon.

Price is what a customer is charged, whatever any page says. Type it in dollars, such as 22.50. Leave Was empty unless it really was that price.

Choice and Choices are the one thing a customer picks, such as Size and S, M, L. Every choice costs the same. Untick Available to order for something sold out: it stays listed, marked Sold out, and cannot be ordered.

8Take orders, with or without card payment

A customer adds a product to their bag from its page, or with Add on a product card, then orders from the Bag and checkout block on your bag page. They give their name and email, and a phone number and a note if they want to.

To be paid by card when they order, click Admin, then Billing, and click Set up card payments under Getting paid. You finish on Stripe, in your own Stripe account, and the money goes straight to you.

Until Stripe is ready the button reads Place order, no payment is taken, and the customer is told you will be in touch. Once Ready to take payments shows under Getting paid, it reads Pay with the total and takes them to a card payment page.

To take orders without card payment even with Stripe connected, select the Bag and checkout block and untick Take card payments.

9Deal with your orders

On Website, click Open Orders under Content. To do lists the orders you have not dealt with, Done the ones you have, and All everything.

Each order shows what was ordered, the total, and the customer's email and phone. Paid means paid by card. Not paid online means you arrange payment with them. Waiting on payment is somebody who went to the card page and has not finished; it changes to Paid by itself if they do.

Click Mark done once you have made it, posted it or handed it over. Not done yet puts it back in To do.

Admins are told about each order in the app and by email, as the Website order notification. A card order is only sent once it is paid.

10Collect listing alerts and saved searches

The real estate agency template gives visitors two ways to ask for new listings by email: the New listings by email band above the footer on every page, and Save this search under the results on Buy and Rent, which saves whatever filters are in the address at the time.

Nothing is sent until the person confirms. They get an email from your business with a Confirm my alert button, and the link works for 7 days.

Once confirmed, they are emailed once an hour about matching listings published after they confirmed, up to ten at a time. A listing is only ever sent to them once, and every email has an Unsubscribe link.

To see who has signed up, go to Website and click Open Listing alerts under Content. An admin can remove somebody with the bin icon beside them.

11Change words by clicking them

Click any block on the page to select it. Click it again to select whatever it sits inside, which is how you reach a section that is completely covered by its own contents.

Double click words to edit them where they are. Type over them and press Enter, or click somewhere else, to keep the change. Press Escape to leave it as it was.

The right panel has three tabs. Content lists everything about the selected block that is not words: how many across, which picture, how many items. Style is spacing, size, type and colour. Ask is where you type an instruction instead.

At the bottom of Content, Add attribute gives the selected block a data or ARIA attribute, such as aria-label for a screen reader or a data attribute a tracking tool looks for. Only data, aria and role attributes can be added, and a row that cannot be used says why beneath it.

12Change how a block looks, at one width

Select a block, then click Style on the right. Spacing, size, type, colour, corners and shadows are all there, in the same order on every block.

It edits the width you are looking at. The Phone, Tablet and Desktop buttons at the top choose both what you see and what you are changing, so there is never a second selector to disagree with the first. The panel says which one at the top: Desktop and wider.

A value set at a narrow width carries up to the wider ones. So set the ordinary case at Phone first, and only change Tablet or Desktop where it genuinely has to differ.

13Give a page its own web address

Open the page and click the address under its title. Type the part after your domain, so /about or /services/wills. Letters, numbers and hyphens, up to four levels deep.

A page that shows one record at a time, such as a person's profile, gives every published record an address one level below its own. Give that page /our-people and the record whose URL slug is jane-smith is at /our-people/jane-smith on your domain. A page at that exact address, if you make one, is shown instead of the record.

See what this changes lists what points at the old address: your other pages, your menu, your footer. Tick Point them at the new address too and they move with it, or leave it and they keep working through the redirect.

Renaming a live page always leaves a redirect. Anyone following the old address, from a bookmark or somebody else's website, lands on the new one. There is nothing to turn on and no way to skip it.

The change is to the draft. Publish the page to put the new address live.

14Ask the AI Assistant for a page, or for how a page shows in search

Open the AI Assistant and say what you want: "make a page about our fees", or "set the search title and description for the About page". It only publishes a page when you have said to.

A share link is /public/pages/ followed by a short name, and that name is unique across every business on the app. When yours is taken, the page gets your business name in front, so services becomes acme-legal-services. The assistant tells you the address it actually used.

A search title can be up to 70 characters and a description up to 160. Longer ones are refused rather than cut off, so nothing goes out halfway through a sentence.

Hiding a page from search engines only happens once you confirm it. On the home page that takes the whole website out of search results, and the assistant says so before it asks.

15Bring the addresses from your old site

On the Website screen, scroll to Old web addresses and click Add addresses from your old site. Paste your list, one per line: the old address, then the new one. A comma, a tab, a space or an arrow between them all work, and a full web address is fine because only the part after your domain is used.

Click Check the list first. It tells you what it would add and, line by line, what it could not use and why. Nothing is written until you click Add.

Each one shows how many people have followed it. Before you remove one, look at that number: removing an address 412 people followed breaks 412 links.

16Use the records you already keep

Open Content from the Website screen and pick a list, People for example. If you already keep those people in one of your own tables, choose it under Link these to your own records and it matches them up by name in one go.

Everything it is sure about is ticked. A name that only matches once you ignore the order, and anybody whose name appears twice, is left for you to decide. Untick anything that is wrong, then Link. Linking only says which of your records is which: nothing is published and nothing is copied.

Open a record and click Copy details across. It shows you every field it would fill, which of the two names it matched on, and exactly what each one would change from and to. Untick anything you want to keep as it is, then copy.

17Put a picture on a page

Select the block, then click Choose image on the right. Upload an image takes a PNG, JPEG, WEBP or GIF up to 10MB, and everything you have uploaded before is in the grid underneath, so the same photo goes on a second page without uploading it twice.

Fill in Alt text: that is what somebody using a screen reader hears. For a picture that is pure decoration, tick Decorative, no alt text needed instead. Anything still missing one is named in the publish panel before the page goes live.

A photo from a phone is often four thousand pixels wide. Smaller copies are made for you when you upload, and a visitor's phone takes the one it needs, so you do not have to resize anything first.

18Find your website's address

Your site has an address from the moment you add a template: yourbusiness.diract.io, made from your business name. Go to Admin, Company, Your web address to see it, and click it to open your site.

Change gives it a different name. Your old address keeps working and sends visitors to the new one, so a link you have already given somebody does not break.

Some names cannot be used because they are ones Diract itself answers on, or ones too general for one business to hold. The box tells you which as you type.

19Put the site on your own domain

Go to Admin, Company, Your own domains. Type a domain you own, without https://, so www.yourfirm.com.au, and click Connect.

Add the DNS records it shows you at whoever manages your domain, then click Check now. It usually takes a few minutes and can take a few hours. Diract keeps checking on its own every hour, so you do not have to sit on the screen.

Add your other addresses the same way, the apex without the www, or a domain you used to trade under. Every one you add sends visitors to your main address, keeping the rest of the link, so an old link to /about/fees still lands on /about/fees.

Make this the main address moves your website to a different one of them. The old main address becomes a redirect to the new one, so nothing you have already sent anybody breaks.

The bin icon disconnects one. Disconnecting the address your website lives on asks you to type it out first, and will not let you go while other addresses still point at it: make one of them the main address first.

20Change the header once, for every page

A template creates a Header and a Footer that every page shares, and the larger templates add a band above the footer, such as Book a table or Appraisal and alerts. They are listed under Shared on every page on the Website screen, below your pages.

Open one and edit it the way you edit anything else. Every page that uses it changes at the same time, so the business name goes in once rather than once per page.

The first time you publish a page, the header and footer it uses go live with it, because a page cannot show a header that has never been published. After that, an edit to the header goes live when you publish the header itself, so a half finished change does not reach every page the moment somebody publishes an unrelated one.

21Set the colours once, for the whole site

Click Website, then Save colours under Colours. There are nine: an accent and the words that go on it, the page, cards, two weights of text, lines, and a dark band with its own text.

These are what the blocks use, so changing the accent changes every button, every price and every badge at once. A published page picks the new colour up immediately without republishing.

In the Style panel, a block's background, text and border are chosen from those same nine rather than from a colour wheel. That is what keeps a site looking like one site after somebody has edited twenty pages of it.

22Ask for a change instead of making it

Click Ask on the right, type what you want, and press the send button. "Add a section about delivery with three points" and "put our name and address in the footer" are both one instruction.

Each step is named as it happens, so a long build is not a silent wait. When it is done it says what it did in a sentence or two.

Before it hands the change back, Testing the page appears as a step. Every link and button it added has to go somewhere real, every form it added needs somewhere to send, every picture needs a description and every list has to read one of your collections. It fixes what fails, and anything it could not fix is named at the end of its reply.

The whole instruction is one step on the undo list. Press Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows) once to take back everything it did.

23What it will not do

It will not write a link, an image, a phone number, a price or a claim about your business that you did not give it. Ask for a logo it has never seen and it asks you for one rather than inventing an address that looks right.

Anything wide is shown before it is applied, as the real change rather than a count: which blocks, which fields, and for a paragraph, the words. Apply and Discard are underneath. Nothing lands on the page from a decision you have not seen.

Publishing and changing the site's colours are never done for you. It puts a button in the chat and you press it. If you are not an admin, the request goes to one for approval instead of being refused.

24Add, move and copy blocks

The left panel's Add tab lists everything that can go on a page, grouped. Drag one onto the page and a line shows exactly where it will land, or click one to put it after whatever is selected.

A selected block has a small toolbar above it: drag it by the handle, move it up or down, duplicate it, put it in a group, select what it sits inside, or delete it.

From the keyboard: Cmd+D duplicates, Cmd+G groups, Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down move a block within its own section, Delete removes it, and Escape selects what it sits inside. Cmd+C and Cmd+V copy a whole section and paste it, including onto a different page of the site.

25Put one of your apps on a page

An admin can add App from the Add tab, under Other. Select it, and choose one of your saved apps under App in Content.

On the website the app runs on its own, with no access to your tables. Anything it asks for is refused, so an app that shows your records shows nothing there: build the ones you put on a page to work without them.

Height set to fit grows with the app, up to 1200 pixels. fixed keeps it at the height you give.

Before this goes public cannot read the words an app draws, and says so when a page has one. Read them yourself before publishing.

26Check it on a phone

Phone, Tablet and Desktop at the top of the editor change the width of the page you are looking at. This is a real change of width, not a picture scaled down, so the page behaves exactly as it will on a phone.

Check the front page and the category page at Phone before publishing. More than half the people who open a shop are on one.

27Publish the pages

Publish at the top right shows what would change on the live page and then asks. View opens it in a new tab once it is live.

A draft that matches what is already live says so, and the button reads Nothing to publish. A page that has never been published says the whole page goes live, rather than drawing a comparison against nothing.

Under the comparison, Before this goes public lists the claims in what you are about to publish: prices and timeframes, rankings like "leading", registrations and memberships, and promises like "same day". It reads only what changed since the last publish, so the fourth publish asks about the two paragraphs you touched rather than the whole page. Text written for you by Ask is marked and listed first, because it is the text nobody has read yet.

A sentence about what the law requires is the one that holds the button. Either change it on the page to quote the rule with its number and say the page is general information current as at a date, or type why it is right as written in the box beside it. Whichever you do, who confirmed it and when is kept against that version of the page.

To put a whole site live at once, go back to Website and click the button beside Your pages, which counts the drafts: Publish 22 drafts for the real estate agency template. Publishing the front page on its own leaves its menu pointing at pages that do not exist yet, and a visitor who clicks one gets nothing. A bar under the button counts them off, so if one fails you can see how far it got.

Publishing pages does not publish records, and publishing a record does not publish a page. A new person, listing or article appears on the live site once both its record and the pages that list it are published.

Publishing is an admin's to do. Anybody in the company can open a page and change it, and the Publish button says so rather than refusing after the fact: it is greyed out with Only an admin can publish beside it.

28Take a page down

Open the page and click the archive icon at the top, beside the clock, which is labelled Take this page down. There are three ways down and the panel names what each one costs.

Archive it takes the page off your website and out of your page list, keeps everything, and can be undone at any time. Somebody who follows an old link is told the page is gone rather than that it is missing, which is what stops it sitting in search results for a year.

Download a copy first gives you the page and every saved version of it as a file. Worth doing before the third one.

Delete it permanently removes the page and its versions. You have to type the page's title exactly, and there is no way back.

29Go back to an earlier version

Click the clock at the top of the editor. Every time you publish, and every so often while you work, a copy of the page is kept, newest first.

What changed beside a version lists what that version did: the blocks added, removed, moved and rewritten, and for a paragraph, the words. A block that lists records from a collection is named at the bottom, because changes to those records are not part of the page and are not shown.

Restore shows what restoring would take back before it does anything, then asks. It comes back as a NEW version, so the page you were on a moment ago is still in the list to go back to.

Restoring changes the draft, not the live page. Click Update the live page afterwards to put it out.

30See who changed the live site

Recent changes at the bottom of the Website screen lists the last fifteen: who published a page, who put an earlier version back, and who took a page off somebody who had it open.

A header or footer that went live because a page needed it says so on its own line, so a section nobody opened turning up as published is explained rather than surprising.

It records changes to the LIVE site, not every edit. Ordinary editing is saved as you type and kept in each page's own version list, behind the clock in the editor.

31When two people have the same page open

The page saves itself as you work. The word beside the width buttons says where it is up to: Saved, Saving..., or Unsaved changes.

Opening the editor holds the page while you are in it. If somebody else has it open, a band across the top names them and says that nothing you change is being saved. An admin can click Take over to take the page from them. Anybody else is told to ask one.

A held page is let go when the editor is closed, and after ninety seconds of silence in any case, so a closed laptop does not keep a page to itself.

A cafe replacing the pizza template's sample deals

The Pizza takeaway template is installed. Its deals page carries four invented offers with invented prices, each with its own conditions line.

Open the deals page from Website. Click Ask, and type: "Change these four deals to ours: a $12 breakfast roll and coffee before 10am on weekdays, a $9 toastie and coffee at lunch, a $28 cake for six with a day's notice, and a $6 filter coffee refill for regulars." One instruction rewrites all four cards.

Then read what it wrote. The conditions line under each offer is a promise the business is making, so it is the line worth checking by hand: "before 10am on weekdays" has to be the real cut off, not a rounded one.

Double click any price to correct it on the page. Publish the deals page, then the rest, from Website.

What each page of a template is for