See how organizations use Inlay to manage their website -> Editing Guide

Update your website yourself

Every website Digital Impact provides comes with Inlay, an editor built into the site itself. You sign in, click what you want to change, and publish. This page is the ten-minute version.

Read the full guide on tryinlay.com (opens in a new tab) Try the live demo (opens in a new tab)

Sign in

Go to your own website and add /login to the address — yoursite.org/login. Sign in, and your site comes back with a dark toolbar along the bottom. That toolbar is the dock, and it means you are editing.

The dock. Left: whether anything is waiting to publish. Middle: your tools. Right: look, then publish.

There is no separate admin area to learn. Visitors never see the dock, your drafts, or your comments — and your own visits are never counted in your site’s analytics.

Change some words

Almost every piece of text on the page can be edited right where it sits.

  1. Move your pointer over the text. A dashed blue outline means you can edit it.
  2. Click, and type.
  3. Click anywhere else. That saves it — there is no Save button.
Solid outline: being edited. Dashed outline: can be edited.

In paragraphs, select some words and a small bar appears for bold, italics, lists and links. Pasting from Word or Google Docs keeps your headings and lists and drops the stray fonts and colors.

Change a button or link

Buttons keep working as buttons while you edit, so clicking one takes you where it goes. To change one, click the small blue pencil on its corner.

  1. Click the pencil.
  2. Change the Label, where it goes, or both. Pick page lists the pages on your site so you never have to type an address.
  3. Save.
The pencil, not the button, opens the editor.

Swap a photo

Photos with a dashed outline can be replaced.

  1. Click the photo.
  2. Upload a new one from your computer, or pick one already on your site from the Library.
  3. Describe it in Alt text — a sentence on what the picture shows, for people using screen readers.
  4. Use image.
Click the photo to replace it. Drag the handle to slide it within its frame.

Big phone photos are fine: they are resized and compressed for you on the way in. To re-frame a photo inside its space, drag the four-arrow handle in its corner, or use Crop in the same window.

Publish

Everything you change is a private draft. You and your teammates see it; the public keeps seeing the site as it was until you publish. You cannot break the live site by experimenting.

  1. An amber dot appears beside anything you have changed.
  2. The left end of the dock counts them: 2 drafts.
  3. Preview hides all the editing marks so you can see the page as a visitor will.
  4. Publish sends all of your drafts live at once, from every page.
An amber dot marks a draft. Publish lights up when there is something to send.

Changed your mind? Click the amber dot, then Reset, and that one change goes back to what is published. Clicking the draft count in the dock lists everything that is waiting.

Write a blog post

Things that repeat — blog posts, events, job listings, staff — live in collections. On the page they have a purple outline instead of a blue one, and you edit them from the dock.

  1. Click Content in the dock and pick the collection.
  2. New starts a post; clicking an existing one opens it.
  3. Fill in the title, the cover image and the body.
  4. Preview opens the post’s own page, the way it will look once it is published.
  5. Save draft to come back to it later, or Publish to put it on the site. You can also set a date and time for it to publish itself.

Posts publish from their own window — the dock’s Publish button is only for changes made directly on the page. Be careful with Delete on a post: it does not ask first.

Ask a teammate

Instead of emailing “the third paragraph on the About page,” pin a comment to the exact spot.

  1. Click Comments in the dock, then click the page where the comment belongs.
  2. Type your comment. Type @ to tag a teammate, and they are notified.
  3. Comment to post it. When it has been dealt with, open the pin and Resolve it.
A comment lives on the page, right where the question is.

Notes work the same way, but only you can ever see them — handy for reminders to yourself. Mentions and announcements arrive at the bell in the bottom right corner.

See who wrote in, and who visited

The More menu in the dock holds the rest.

  1. Forms — every message sent through the forms on your site, with a button to download them as a spreadsheet.
  2. Analytics — how many people visit, which pages they read and where they came from. No cookies, no tracking scripts.
  3. Assets — every image on your site, in one place.
  4. Backups — save a restore point before a big change, so the whole site can be rolled back.

When you are stuck

Some changes are bigger than the editor — a new section, a different layout, something that looks broken. Click Dev Help in the dock, say what you need in a sentence or two, and it goes straight to us with the page you are on attached.

There is more it can do

Rearranging the sections of a page, scheduling posts, setting how a page looks in Google and when it is shared, checking a page at phone size, keyboard shortcuts, and what to do when something goes wrong — the full guide on Inlay’s own site covers all of it, with a quick version and a detailed one.

Open the full guide (opens in a new tab)

The full guide follows the newest version of Inlay, so now and then it will mention a button your site does not have yet. It arrives with your site’s next update.