Your first site

A walk through the panel, from the first post to a site you can show people, in about twenty minutes.

You have Wake running, either on your computer or on a web host, and you have created your account. This page takes you once through everything you need for a real site.

1. Look around

Open /wake. The dashboard shows visitors, page views and reading time. On a new site it is empty; it fills up as soon as people visit.

The menu on the left follows what you can do. As the owner you see everything:

Section	What it is for
Posts, Pages, Media	your content
Menus, Categories	how the site is organised
Statistics, Consent	who reads what, and the cookie banner
Themes, Plugins, Assistants, Team, Backups, Redirects, Settings	running the site

2. Name your site

Open Settings. Under Website set the time zone and how post addresses look. The site title and description live in the file content/website.md (one per language):

---
title: Heimatverein Stiepel
description: Geschichte und Gegenwart im Bochumer Süden
---

3. Write a post

Posts → New post.

Type the title, then the text. Formatting works with the toolbar or with Markdown shortcuts: ## for a heading, - for a list, **bold**.
Drag an image into the text, or set a header image in the side panel.
Click Publish, or choose a date to publish it later.

Every post is a folder in content/posts/ with a Markdown file inside. You can open it in any text editor; Wake notices changes made outside the panel. More in Write and publish.

4. Add pages and a menu

Pages → New page, for example "About us" and "Contact".

Pages form a tree: drag them to change the order, or onto another page to nest them. Add to menu order puts a page into the main menu. The menu updates itself; under Menus you can arrange it by hand and add links or a footer menu. See Arrange pages and menus.

5. Choose the look

Themes shows the installed themes. Wake comes with Tide. Its settings let you pick an accent colour, show upcoming events on the home page and add a footer text. To build your own, see Build a theme.

6. Events, if you need them

Wake comes with a category Events with date, place, admission and registration. Create a post, choose the category, fill in the date, and it appears in the event list and in calendars. Repeating events work, too. See Categories and events.

7. Decide about statistics and consent

Wake counts visits without cookies by default, so no banner is needed. Under Settings → Statistics you can switch counting off or ask for consent for more detail. Read Analytics and Consent before you go live; the consent page also gives you a ready-made section for your privacy policy.

8. Before you go live

Set up mail under Settings → Sending mail and send yourself a test mail (Invite your team).
Turn on two-factor sign-in for your account.
Write a backup and download it.
Fill in the imprint and the privacy policy. Wake created both as drafts with placeholders in square brackets; the dashboard links them. Publish them, and your theme links them in the footer.
Still building? Switch on Closed site under Settings: visitors are sent to the sign-in page and search engines stay out.
Moved to your real domain? Correct APP_URL in .env; Settings warns while it differs from the address you use.