Creating a beautiful website with NationBuilder doesn't require a tech team or advanced knowledge. You can set up blogs, calendars, about pages and much more from the Websites menu in your control panel.
Creating a new website page
To create a new page, click on Websites > {Your Site's Name} > New page. First, name the page. When you type in a name, the slug will auto-populate, though it can be changed. A page slug is the portion of the page address (or URL) that identifies that particular page, it comes after the .com or .org in your domain name.
Next, you choose the type of page you want to create based on the desired functionality.
Decide whether to include the page in the top and/or supporter navigation. The top navigation is the navigation that shows on top of your website and the supporter navigation is what shows up on the left or right side (it depends on which theme you're using) of someone's screen when they are logged in and viewing the site.
Finally, click the "Create Page" button.
Editing your new page
When editing a page, the third menu item will be unique based on the functionality of the page you are editing. For example, a Suggestion Box page will have "Box settings" that allow you to customize advanced options for that page type.
All other main menu items are available for all page types.
On all pages under Settings, you can edit the name of your page and its slug.
In this video from NationBuilder Live, VP of Community walks you through the basic settings for a web page:
"Basic settings for a web page" can also be viewed in high definition on our YouTube page.
You can change the status of the page - here are your options:
- drafted: you are working on the page, other people logged into the control panel can see the page exists, but it does not display on your live website
- published: the page displays on your live website
- expired: a time-bound page (e.g. an event) occurred in the past and will no longer display
- archived: the page is removed from navigation of your site, but can be found via search
- deleted: the page is removed from your site and the web completely, but can be viewed in the control panel
- rule violated: the page has been flagged for rule violation and needs to be reviewed to confirm that a rule has been violated
You can limit who can view a page with the "Who can view this page?" menu under Settings. By default, pages are created so that anyone can view them.
More options for your page settings:
- Add tags to create another way to navigate your website. Tags display on your public site and group related pages to one another, providing visitors who click through with a quick collection of related pages.
- User-submitted pages: If you check the box next to "This page was submitted by a user," the author's name becomes a hyperlink to his public profile and that page appears in the person's public profile. If the author does not have control panel access to your site, then when she is logged into your site and viewing the page, she will see a link to edit the page in her supporter nav bar.
- Add rotating images to a page under Settings >Featured content sliders.
- You can optimize your results in search engines under Settings > SEO.
- Edit the default face tweet for the page and define the text and image picked up by Facebook under Settings > Social media.
Adding rich media to your pages
NationBuilder features tight Embed.ly integration so videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and YouStream will automatically display. This means you can paste a URL directly into your content editor and the video will automatically display on your live page. The URL to be embedded should be on its own line within the content editor (hit return after typing or pasting in the URL).
Other content - such as documents on Scribd and presentations on Slideshare will also display. We recommend using Scribd and Slideshare to offer visitors to your site a way to interact with your content on the web, rather than requiring them to download files from your site. You can also upload documents (up to 20mb each) to the files section of your page.
This is especially useful for blogs, but you can embed a URL like this anywhere there is a content editor, like the "intro blurb" section of a donation page.
Action and navigation options
When creating a donation, event, feedback, moneybomb, petition, signup, suggestion box, survey, volunteer, or vote pledge page, you can specify the page a person should land on after completing the action on the page. This is called an action chain and helps direct a visitor’s discovery of the pages of your website. For example, after signing up for your site, a person could be redirected to a calendar. After RSVPing to an event, he could be taken to your endorsement page.
- You specify the page people should land on next from the page-specific settings, the third menu item when editing a page.
Pages can be also grouped together as subpages of a parent page to help with navigation. You can create a new subpage from the Subpages tab of any page. Go to Subpages > New page to create a new subpage. If you’ve already created a page and decide it would work better as a subpage, go to Settings > Page settings and type the slug of the new parent page in the text box “This page is a subpage of.”
The order that subpages appear in can be changed in Subpages > Sub nav pages by dragging and dropping the names of the pages.
Advanced website editing
When you want to use content originally contained in a Word document, we recommend using the Paste from Word icon. All Word content contains additional coding that is built into Word which is not useful for displaying content on the web. Paste from Word strips all of this extra content and leaves you with clean text - under most circumstances, it will leave bullets and numbering created in Word intact. It is not recommended to style your content in Word and then paste it into the content editor - much of that formatting will not transfer.
You have three options for formatting content:
1. Use the formatting features in the content editor
2. Click the HTML icon and define in-line formatting using HTML
3. Use CSS to define the style of the page in the Page Template
HTML Source Editor
The HTML icon in the content editor takes you to a pop-up screen where you can define in-line formatting using HTML. Click the green "Update" button to save your work or the red "Cancel" button to close the window without saving.
Content from many sources can be embedded in your page by placing the URL for the content in plain text on a single line in the content editor (see above). If you place Javascript or other code into the HTML Source Editor, it will be stripped out of the page, even if you click the Update button.
Page Template
The page template is where you want to place iFrame, Javascript or other code that you want to be used within that page only. More information on editing the page template is covered in our theme documentation.
Additional resources
- Learn how to switch themes and customize your navigation elements
- Theme documentation for front-end developers
How to start a blog
How to create a custom website theme