Custom website templates

Before you start, open this page: Website / Website Templates.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Most businesses never touch this, and that is the right outcome. This lesson exists so that if you do meet it, you know what it is and what it costs you.

What a custom template is

Normally your public site is drawn by one of FeePrime’s built-in designs. That is why setting a brand colour and a logo is enough to get a site that hangs together.

A website template replaces that with markup you control. The record holds a label, a reference, and a body, which is the template itself.

Point your landing page settings at it, and it draws your public pages instead of the built-in design.

One template draws everything

This is the part that catches people out.

A custom template is not a design for your front page. It is the whole site.

It is told which page it is being asked to draw, and it has to handle every single case. The front page. List pages. Detail pages. Lessons. All of it.

   one template
        |
        +-- front page
        +-- list pages   (services, updates, courses, shop...)
        +-- detail pages (one service, one post, one lesson...)

And here is the dangerous part. A case the template does not handle does not fall back to the built-in design.

It draws nothing. You get a page with your header and footer and an empty middle, returned as a perfectly successful page.

That is genuinely hard to work out from the outside. It is the strongest reason not to have one unless somebody is actively looking after it.

What you get, and what you give up

You get a site that looks like nobody else’s, with the layout and the typefaces under your control.

You give up getting new things for free.

When FeePrime adds new public pages, or new fields on existing ones, they appear in the built-in design and not in yours. Not until somebody adds them by hand.

Your template is a snapshot of what the platform could do on the day it was written.

The rule

If you have a custom template, one named person owns it. And new public features get checked against it before anybody announces them.

If nobody owns it, use the built-in design and spend the effort on your content instead. That is what visitors actually came for.

You have finished

That is the end of Your Public Website. Here is what you now know.

Which screen controls which part of the page.
The difference between a page and a post.
How services become bookings.
Who appears publicly, and who just logs in.
Where your mailing list comes from.
What a custom design costs you.

Keep staging.feeprime.com to hand as you go. Every one of these settings is safer to meet there first.

The next course is Products and Offers, which covers the shop. That is the one public page deliberately left out of this course.