Setting up your website quickly is key to building a great nation. Under the Pages tab in the control panel, you can click on Settings to do things like manage which items appear on the top navigation menu of your site, manage who can see your site if it's going to be under construction for a few days (just remember to change this to "anyone" when you launch, otherwise people who don't have the right login permissions will see only the login form), manage privacy settings, add or replace your site's small logo (this shows up in the header with a headline and in your site sidebar, depending on your theme; for sizing the logo, you want a 1:1 aspect ratio and 140p by 140p is a good size), replace the site header image or logo (960x150p is a good size), and replace a background image (1024x768p) depending on your theme. You'll also be able to connect Google Analytics for site visitor stats if you want to do that (see http://nationbuilder.com/how_can_i_add_google_apps_and_webmaster_tools_to_my_nation).

Another important setting here is Supporter Nav, which will let you specify up to three pages to link to with big buttons on your site's universal sidebar. Linking your join, volunteer, and donate pages is often the best choice here.

Under Pages, you'll be able to see all your pages and click on "edit" or the page slug (that's the part of the URL address for the page after .com/ or .org/ on your website) to add and adjust content. Important pages to edit here are your volunteer signup, where under volunteer settings you'll be able to specify roles that people are signing up for and automatically tag volunteers in your people database so you know what they are volunteering for any can easily follow up. 

You'll also want to create any upcoming events by editing your calendar page and clicking on events & subpages. Under new event > social, you'll also be able to link an existing Facebook event URL (site address from your browser) to your NationBuilder event and have all Facebook RSVPs link back into your event and people database.

You may also want to edit the "join" page and click on showing it in the top navigation, if you've not already linked it in the supporter nav under Pages > Settings > Supporter nav. You might even want it in both the top navigation and the supporter nav (that appears in the site-wide sidebar).

To create new pages, just click on Pages > New page and select the page type you want to create.

To insert videos into page content, you can just past the link (URL) for the video from most popular video services such as Vimeo and YouTube. You can do the same for photos and slideshows from Flickr and Picasa. If you want to add photos to your content pages from your desktop or another URL, you can first upload any desktop files under the Files button on your page editor, and then click on the photo icon on your content editor. Photos you've uploaded will appear in a drop-down menu.

One of the most important things you can set up to make a dynamic and visually compelling website quickly is the text and featured content sliders for your About page. Just click on the about page slug, go to settings > featured content sliders, and select the photos you want to feature and the pages you want to link them to. For most official themes, 660p wide is great (960p wide for the Resolve theme), and you also want the slider photos to be of exactly equal depth. Three to five strong images makes up a great featured slider gallery for your front page (About is the default home page). Here's more on setting up your featured sliders - nationbuilder.com/how_do_featured_content_sliders_work

For blog and events post images, 660p wide is also the recommended image size.

For much more on setting up your website, check out nationbuilder.com/website

You can also view an introduction to setting up your website at nationbuilder.com/how_pages_work