Themes and design

Under Themes, pick a template and the site restyles at once. Switching template is just a setting: your posts, pages and media don't move or change, because the template only supplies the surrounding shell, not the content inside it.

Templates

There are four general templates — Default, Business, Blog and Landing Page — and seven made for a purpose:

• Magazine — a newspaper masthead and a front page with a lead story.
• Portfolio — large image tiles for photographers, designers and studios.
• Shop — a storefront with the cart always in reach.
• Restaurant & Café — warm tones, with menu, ordering and bookings a click away.
• Podcast — built around your show and its player.
• Courses & Education — a calm catalogue of what you teach.
• Events & Conference — bold, with your programme up front.

Which templates you can choose depends on your plan; the purpose templates are on the higher plans. A template made for a feature you don't have yet still works as a design. Picking a template also brings its suggested colours and fonts — turn off Bring the template's colours and fonts first to keep your own.

See it before you save

The preview at the top of Themes is your real site with your unsaved changes, in desktop or phone width. Click around inside it: every page keeps the draft. Visitors see nothing until you press Save theme. If you open your site in another tab within the hour, a bar at the bottom says you are previewing, with a link to leave.

Layout

Each template can be adjusted: the header layout and style (a thin rule, plain, a shaded bar, or a bar in your accent colour), how wide the content reads, how the home page lists your posts (a list, cards, a grid, a magazine front page or an image gallery), and the footer (simple, centred, columns or a single line). Reset to template undoes all of it.

Colour and type

Choose an accent from the palette, or enter your own brand colour as a hex code. A brand colour is adjusted just enough for text and buttons to stay readable in light and dark mode — its hue stays yours, and the Themes screen shows the result. You can also give the page a warm, cool or accent-tinted background, keep the site always light or always dark (or follow each visitor's device, with an optional switch in the header), and set a body font, a separate heading font, the text size and the corner radius.

The menu

Under Navigation, a link can point at the home page, a page, a post, a category or any address. Add sub-links under an item to give it a dropdown; leave a parent's URL empty to make it a heading that only opens its sub-links. On phones the whole menu opens from a menu button. The Blog link at the end of the menu can be turned off under Themes.

Logo, favicon and social image

Under Settings, upload your logo, your favicon, and the image used when a page of your site is shared on social media. These stay the same across every template.

A landing page instead of a blog list

If your plan includes it, Landing page lets you build your home page from sections — a hero, features, pricing, a form, a map and more — instead of a list of recent posts, and add further landing pages for campaigns at their own addresses. Changes are drafts you preview and publish when ready. Everything about it is in Landing pages.

The footer

Under Footer, write the line shown at the bottom of every page, add a few links — a privacy policy, terms, a contact page — and link your social profiles. Write {year} anywhere in your text and it always shows the current year. If your site is in more than one language, each language gets its own tab, and a language you leave empty shows the English footer. The “Published with VPress” credit can be hidden on plans that include it; on other plans the switch on that screen is locked.