Your first site, step by step
From creating your account to going live — the whole path, in order.
Overview
Every Tropic Arts site takes the same path: create your account, start from a template, make it yours in the editor, then take it live. This guide walks that path in order — follow along with your own site open in another tab.
Nothing you do along the way is public. A new site sits behind an “Opening Soon” page until you decide to open it, so you can take as long as you like getting it right.
Building costs nothing. Your first site starts on the free trial, which includes the full editor, hosting, and a Tropic Arts web address. You only need to choose a plan at the last step, when you make the site public.
Create your account
One login covers everything you build, so you'll only do this once.
- Open the sign-up page and enter your first name, last name, and email, then confirm you're 18 or older.
- Read the Terms & Conditions. The Create account button stays disabled until you've scrolled to the end of them.
- Check your email for a temporary password — it can take a minute to arrive — and enter it.
- Set a password of your own, at least 8 characters, and you're in.
You land on Home, the dashboard that spans every site on your login. It's worth knowing where it is: Home carries your setup checklist while a site is still a draft, and your orders, appointments, and traffic once it's live.
Pick a template
You never start from a blank page. Every site begins as a complete, designed template — all of them built in-house — and everything in one is yours to change.
- In the side navigation, open Sites, then click Add a site.
- Use the industry chips across the top to narrow the gallery down to templates built for work like yours.
- Read the feature chips on each card. They tell you what a template comes with — an online store, appointments, listings, and so on — so you can match the template to what you actually need.
- Click Preview on anything that catches your eye. It opens the real template in a new tab, full size, so you can click through it the way a visitor would.
- When you've found the one, click Use this template.
Choose for structure, not color. Palettes, fonts, images, and wording all change in a few clicks — the sections a template gives you, and the features it's built around, are what's worth choosing carefully.
Name your site and claim its address
Choosing a template opens a short form — two fields, and then you're building.
- Site name — what your business is called. It's used in browser tabs and search results, in the emails your site sends, and anywhere your name appears on the site itself.
- Website address — leave it blank and it's derived from your name, or type your own. Your site lives at that label under tropic-arts.com, and if the one you want is taken, a number is added.
- Click Create site. It's created from the template as a draft, ready to edit.
Your name and your address aren't locked together. Renaming the site later updates the tabs, emails, and text everywhere and leaves the web address exactly as it is. When you're ready for an address of your own, a custom domain sits in front of all of this — bought separately from your plan; see the Domains & email guide.
Let AI write the first draft
As soon as the site exists you land on “Build [your site] with AI.” Describe your business in a couple of sentences — who you are, where you are, what you sell, the tone you want — and your home page is written for you, with your words in place of the template's.
It happens once, and it's a starting point rather than a finished site: you fine-tune everything afterwards in the editor. You can set your brand colors here too, either by picking a ready-made palette or setting the accent, page background, and text colors yourself.
Not interested? Choose “Skip — I'll build it myself” and you go straight to your sites list with the template exactly as it was designed. Nothing is lost either way.
Make it yours in the editor
The editor is the heart of the platform, and it works the way you'd hope: you edit the real page, not a form that describes it. Open it from the setup checklist on Home, or from a site's menu on the Sites list.
- Click any text and type. Headlines, paragraphs, button labels, prices — they all edit in place.
- Click an image to swap it, either uploading your own or reusing one you've already added.
- Add a section from the block menu. You're offered the blocks that suit your template — a hero, a gallery, a pricing table, a contact form — and each one arrives already styled to match.
- Drag sections up and down to reorder the page, and delete the ones you don't need.
- Made a mess? Undo and redo sit in the header and step back through everything you've done.
- Click Preview to see the page exactly as a visitor will, then Publish when you're happy with it.
The editor saves constantly, but it saves to a draft. Your published site doesn't change until you press Publish — so a half-finished page can sit for a week without anyone seeing it. The Visual editor guide covers all of this in more depth.
Work through the setup checklist
While a site is still a draft, Home shows a “Finish setting up [your site]” card with a running count of what's done. It's the shortest path to live:
- Add your content — open the editor and make the pages yours. It ticks itself off once your site has more than one page.
- Connect payments — only needed if you're selling, and only once the site is on the Store plan. You connect Stripe yourself under Settings → Payments: Set up payments hands you over to Stripe's own secure flow, and the step ticks off once Stripe switches charges on.
- Add a custom domain — optional, sold separately, and easy to leave for later. Your free tropic-arts.com address works perfectly well in the meantime.
- Choose a plan — the one step you can't skip, since a trial site can't be made public.
- Publish your site — the last step, covered below.
The checklist is per-site: if you're building more than one, each draft site gets its own card. Payments is the one step with nothing to click on the card itself — you do it in that site's settings. Anywhere else, a missing Open → link means it's a step your role can't act on, so ask whoever owns the site to take it.
Take your site live
A new site is a draft. It already exists at its address, but anyone who visits sees an “Opening Soon” page instead of your site, while you, signed in, see the real thing. Going live lifts that gate.
One thing to know before you click: a trial site can't be activated. If you're still on the trial, Activate turns into a prompt to choose a plan — pick one and the site goes live straight after.
- Open Sites in the side navigation.
- Find your site and click Activate on its Draft/Live toggle.
- Confirm. You'll get a “[your site] is live!” message and the toggle flips over.
It's reversible. “Back to draft” puts the Opening Soon page back up at any time, and activating again later doesn't charge you twice — your plan is billed when you choose it and then monthly, never per activation.
Where to go next
Going live is the beginning, not the end. Depending on what your site is for:
- Selling online — set up products, shipping, and checkout in the Store & payments guide.
- Taking bookings — add your services and open your calendar in the Bookings guide.
- Writing and mailing — publish posts and send newsletters in the Content & marketing guide.
- An address of your own — connect or buy a domain (sold separately), and set up email on it, in the Domains & email guide.
- Everything else about this one site — its name, brand, logos, and colors all live in Site settings.
All of it is yours to do, at your own pace. If something goes wrong or you'd like a hand with it, open Requests in the side navigation and click + to send it over — a person will pick it up from there.
Frequently asked questions
No — and there's nowhere to write any. Every change is made by clicking the thing you want to change and typing, or by dragging sections into a different order. If you can use a word processor, you can build your site.
They're two different switches, and it catches almost everyone once. Publish, in the editor, pushes the edits you've made on a page out to your live site. Activate, on the Sites list, decides whether the public can see the site at all. A brand-new site needs both: publish your pages, then activate the site.
Most people have a real, presentable site the same day. The account and the site take a few minutes each, the AI draft another few, and after that it's however long you want to spend on wording and pictures. Stop and come back as often as you like — nothing expires.
Yes. The free trial gives you the full editor, hosting, and a Tropic Arts address, so you can build and preview as much as you want. A plan is only needed for the last step — making the site public — and for sending email campaigns.
Not in place. A template isn't a skin over your content — it's the set of sections your site is built from, so there's no switch that swaps one design underneath another. If you want to try a different one, create a second site from it and build there — nothing stops you having both, and comparing them side by side is the quickest way to decide.
Yes. Every section is built to be responsive and keeps its designed proportions on any screen, so you arrange sections rather than resizing them by hand. Preview in the editor before you publish and you'll see exactly what visitors get.
Undo and redo step back through your changes, and nothing you do reaches visitors until you publish. If a page has already gone out, keep editing and publish again — there's no limit on how many times you publish.
Yes. A site can have more than one person on it, each with their own login and their own level of access — some can edit pages, others can change settings or billing. Add or invite them from the site's Staff & permissions settings.