Site content

Edit what shows on your church's public website. Psalmly auto-builds the layout — you fill in the words and links.

How is Site content organised?

The Site content area in the admin sidebar opens on an Overview and then a section per part of your site. Each section is a single form (or list-of-forms) — there's no freeform page builder.

Per-page content:

• Home — the hero, intro, and the slots that make up your home page.
• About — the longer "who we are" copy shown on /about.
• Contact — the contact-page copy (the address, service times, and message form fill in automatically).
• Give — the give-page copy (the funds come from your giving setup).

Building blocks shared across pages:

• Identity — the welcome paragraph, hero photo, primary call-to-action, and an optional pill linking out to your existing main website.
• Branding — your brand colour, logo, and secondary colour.
• Theme — pick one of four visual themes (Beacon · Harbor · Sterling · Cathedral, modern → traditional) and choose Auto / Light / Dark for the colour scheme.
• Staff — name, title, bio, and photo for each person you want to feature. Anyone can be a card; staff aren't tied to membership.
• Important links — the curated list of external links shown in the sidebar and footer (social, sermon podcast URL, "donate by mail", anything else). Drag to reorder. Icons are auto-detected from the URL for Facebook / X / YouTube / Instagram / Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Vimeo / TikTok; override per link if you want a different one.
• Service times — the recurring weekly pattern shown on the public site (e.g. "Sundays 10am — Worship Gathering"). Display-only — separate from scheduling, which is where you plan individual services.
• Ministry pages — a locked-template page for each ministry you want to feature (daycare, youth, food pantry, etc.). Each gets its own URL under your church's public site (e.g. /grace-daycare). You can't freeform-design a ministry page — fill in the fields and Psalmly composes the page.

That's it. There is no page editor, no draft / publish workflow, no freeform block builder. Every public route is auto-generated from these forms + the church data you already maintain elsewhere (events, giving funds, etc.). Your edits go live as soon as you save.

What pages does my church get?

Six routes, always present, on every Psalmly church:

Plus a route for each Ministry page you add (at /<your-slug>).

You don't create or edit any of these routes directly. They render themselves from the data in Site content + the rest of the admin.

How do I make my website live?

Your public website is live the moment a visitor opens it. There's no "publish" button — every form in Site content saves immediately, and the public site renders the latest version on the next page load.

The first time you set up your church, the only fields that matter for a basic, presentable site are:

• Identity → intro copy (one welcoming paragraph).
• Service times (so visitors know when to come).
• Address (set under Settings → Identity).

Add Staff, Important links, About copy, and Ministry pages as you have them. Every section is optional — pages with no content gracefully collapse the section rather than show empty placeholders.

How does the dynamic band on Home work?

Right below the hero on the Home page is a small evolving band — it picks the most useful thing to show, in this order:

1. A featured event (if you have an upcoming event flagged "Featured on homepage" in the next 14 days).
2. The next regular service (computed from your service times — e.g. "Next service: Sunday 10am").
3. The latest important link flagged "Feature in hero band" (e.g. a sermon podcast URL).

If nothing's eligible, the band hides. You don't manage it — it stays fresh because the data underneath does.

How do I add or edit staff?

Open Site content → Staff. Click Add staff member and fill in:

• Name — required.
• Title — "Lead Pastor", "Worship Director", anything you want.
• Photo — upload a portrait headshot right here (JPG/PNG/WebP, up to 4 MB), or paste a photo URL instead. Either way it crops to a 4:5 portrait on your public site, so a head-and-shoulders shot looks best.
• Bio — a short paragraph.

Order is set by dragging — grab the handle on the left of each row in the Staff list and drop it where you want. The order you set is the order people appear on /about.

Cards render on /about as big portraits, styled to match your chosen theme. A card with no photo shows a tidy initials placeholder, so a half-finished team still looks intentional. Staff cards aren't tied to your member list — anyone can be a card, including non-members (consultants, the daycare director, a guest speaker).

How do I add an important link?

Open Site content → Important links and click Add important link. Fill in:

• Label — what visitors see ("Listen to sermons", "Visit our daycare").
• URL — the full link.
• Icon — auto-detected from the URL by default; override from the dropdown if you want a different one.
• Feature in hero band — when nothing more important is happening (see "dynamic band" above), this link can fill the home-page band. Most churches use this for their sermon podcast.

Drag the rows to reorder. Lower-positioned links show first in the sidebar.

How do I add a Ministry page?

Open Site content → Ministry pages and click Add ministry page.

Fields:

• Name — "Grace Daycare", "Youth Group", whatever your ministry is called.
• URL slug — the part after your church's address (e.g. grace-daycare for /grace-daycare). Auto-filled from the name; edit it if you want. A handful of slugs are reserved (about, contact, events, give, join, series, ministries, admin, member) — the form rejects them.
• Hero photo URL — optional.
• Intro — 1–2 sentences that show under the hero.
• Detail copy — the main body. Schedule, philosophy, ages, anything visitors should know. Markdown works.
• Practical info — optional key/value rows (Hours / Location / Ages / Contact). Add and remove rows as needed.
• CTA label + URL — a single primary call-to-action ("Enroll your child" → external form link).
• Show in site navigation — on by default. When on, the page appears in your site's Ministries menu, in the footer, and on the /ministries index. Turn it off to keep a page reachable only by its direct URL (handy for a page you've linked to from somewhere specific but don't want listed).

Save and the page is live at /<your-slug>.

How do visitors find my Ministry pages?

Every Ministry page with Show in site navigation on is surfaced three ways, automatically — you don't have to wire up any links:

• A Ministries dropdown in your site's top navigation. It lists your pages and, once you have more than a handful, caps the menu and adds a See all → link.
• A Ministries column in the footer.
• A dedicated /ministries index page — a tidy grid of every published ministry page. This is where See all → goes, so the navigation stays clean no matter how many ministries you add.

Ordering. Drag the rows in Site content → Ministry pages by their handle to set the order they appear in the menu, footer, and index. Pages hidden from navigation show a small "hidden" marker in the list.

What if I rename a Ministry page's URL?

The old URL keeps working. When you change the slug, Psalmly automatically adds a permanent redirect from the old path to the new one, so external bookmarks, social-media posts, and search-engine results don't break.

How do I change my service times?

Open Site content → Service times. Each row is a Day + Start time + Label (e.g. "Sun 10:00 Worship Gathering"). Add and remove rows as needed.

These are for the public website only — they're the recurring weekly pattern visitors see. Individual service planning (run-of-show, teams, rotas) lives in Scheduling, separately.

How do I pick a theme?

Open Site content → Theme. You'll see four theme cards; click one to switch your church's public site. The change is immediate.

The four themes are a spectrum from modern to traditional. Pick the one that sounds most like your church:

• Beacon — Modern. Crisp sans-serif headlines, full-bleed photo heroes, airy spacing. Reads contemporary and confident.
• Harbor — Warm. Warm cream tones, rounded corners, friendly serif headlines beside photo plates. Reads welcoming and human.
• Sterling — Refined. Editorial Playfair headlines, ruled dividers, centred restraint. Reads composed and considered.
• Cathedral — Traditional. Garamond grandeur on parchment, dotted- leader orders of service, ornaments. Reads formal and historic.

Each theme owns its own Home and About layout; the Events, Give, Contact, Ministry and Series pages share one arrangement that the theme re-skins, so visitors always know where to find them.

Your church's brand colour (set in Site content → Branding) layers on top of every theme — themes never bake in a colour. The hot-pink, deep-navy, mint, and bright-yellow ends of the brand spectrum all stay legible because the heroes and give bands add a dark scrim on top of the brand-tinted background.

How do I pick light or dark mode for my public site?

Below the theme cards on Site content → Theme there's an Auto · Light · Dark toggle.

• Auto (the default) — the public site follows each visitor's device preference (their OS light/dark setting). Most churches stay here.
• Light — locks the public site to the light surface for everyone, regardless of device.
• Dark — locks the public site to the dark surface.

Pick Light or Dark when your brand has a strong opinion (e.g. near-black brand reads best on dark; a sunny coral brand reads best on light). Otherwise leave it on Auto — both surfaces are designed to look great with your brand colour.

Where do my Home, About, and Give photos go?

In Site content → Identity there's a Photos subsection with three optional URL fields:

• Home hero photo — sits behind the full-bleed welcome band on the homepage.
• About page photo — the "who we are" feature plate on Home and About.
• Give band photo — sits behind the homepage giving call-out.

All three are optional. If you leave them empty, the layout falls back to a tasteful brand plate (your monogram on a brand-tinted background) on content slots, and a brand gradient on full-bleed bands. About and give fall back to the hero photo before the plate, so a church that fills in only the hero gets a coherent site across every page.

These themes are image-forward — even one good photo dramatically changes how the site feels — but every slot is designed to be beautiful empty too.

Where do my church's name, address, brand colour, and social links live?

They're split between two places:

• Settings → Identity owns the church identity — name, slug, denomination, city, country, time zone, address, blurb, and contact email.
• Site content → Branding owns your brand colour, logo, and secondary colour.
• Site content → Important links is where your social links (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your existing website, podcast, etc.) live — they show in the public sidebar and footer with auto-detected icons.

The rule of thumb: Settings owns the church's identity; Site content owns the public-website specifics (copy, branding, staff, links, ministry pages, theme).

How do I see what my public site looks like?

You have three increasingly direct ways to see the live site:

1. Global "View site ↗" button — top-right of every admin page, opens your church's home page in a new tab. Always one click away, no matter where you are in the admin.
2. Live preview drawer — bottom-right of every Site content sub-route, a floating Live preview button slides out a right-side panel that shows the actual public page you're editing. The drawer auto-reloads after every save, so iterating on copy or settings shows up immediately. Closes with a click; your preference is remembered.
3. In-form mini-previews — each editing surface (Identity / About / Service times / Theme / Important links / Ministry pages) shows a small Live preview card next to the inputs. It updates as you type — no save needed — so you see how your copy reads, how a button label lands, or where an external link will surface before you commit.

These three layers are all "always-live" — Psalmly doesn't have a draft/publish split. Every save lands on the public site immediately; the previews above just let you see it without the tab dance.

What does the Site content overview show me?

Open Site content in the sidebar and you'll see a dashboard:

• Current theme — your chosen visual identity with a "Change theme" shortcut.
• Site completion — a progress bar showing how many of the seven sections you've set. Useful as a glance check that nothing essential is missing.
• Next best move — one focused nudge toward the most-impactful empty section. (Brand-new churches see "Add at least one service time" first; once that's set, the prompt shifts to the welcome paragraph, then to a sermon-podcast link, and so on.) Click the CTA to jump straight to the section.
• Section cards — your seven content surfaces, each marked Filled or Not set + a hint of where it surfaces on the public site.
• Recent edits — the last 5 sections you touched, with a relative timestamp. Click any row to jump back into that section.

Empty sections (Staff / Important links / Ministry pages / Service times) carry a friendly empty-state card with a concrete example + the primary Add button. You don't have to guess what each section is for.

How does my site show up on Google?

Automatically — there's nothing to configure:

• Every page carries its own title and description, derived from your church's data (name, intro copy, ministry intros, event details).
• A sitemap is generated at /sitemap.xml on your public site, listing your pages, nav-visible Ministry pages, and upcoming events. A matching /robots.txt points crawlers at it.
• Structured data (schema.org) is embedded on your home page (your church, address, service times, social profiles) and on every event page — this is what makes events eligible for rich results in search.
• Social sharing cards — your hero photo becomes the preview image when someone shares your home or about page; event pages share their cover image.

If you've connected a custom domain (Growth plan), every page declares the custom domain as its canonical address, so your *.psalmly.app subdomain and your own domain never compete in search results — Google consolidates everything onto your domain.

Ministry pages hidden from navigation are also left out of the sitemap — reachable by direct link, not advertised to search engines.

What about the old CMS — the page editor, drafts, blocks?

Retired. The CMS was a freeform page builder; in practice it was harder to maintain than it was helpful, and a strong public site needed Psalmly to own the layout. The Site content sections above replace it:

• Pages with drafts and a publish workflow → replaced by always-live forms that save immediately.
• Block-based page editor → replaced by the auto-generated standard routes + the locked-template Ministry pages.
• Page templates → replaced by the four themes (each theme owns the visual identity of every route).
• Per-page SEO settings → replaced by per-page metadata derived from the church's own data (name, about, ministry intro, etc.).

If you have a need that isn't met by the current Site content surface (e.g. a specific page type like a Capital Campaign landing), reach out — we add specific page types when real demand shows up, not catch-all freeform editors.