SitePad offers a large gallery of professionally designed themes for many industries. The theme sets your layout, colours, fonts and sample pages. Picking a good starting point saves hours of editing, and you can change most of the design later.
Before you start
- Open SitePad from cPanel → Software → SitePad Website Builder.
- Think about the pages you need (Home, About, Services, Contact, Blog) and your brand colours.
What makes a good theme
- Structure first: choose a theme whose home page layout matches your content, not just its photos. Photos are easy to replace; layouts take longer.
- Mobile view: most visitors use phones. Use the device preview to check the theme on a small screen.
- Readable fonts and contrast: light grey text on white looks stylish but is hard to read.
- Fewer sections: a theme with a clear, short home page is easier to fill with real content.
Browse and preview themes
- In SitePad open the themes area (shown when you create a site, and available later from the site's settings or Themes menu).
- Filter by category, such as Business, Education, Health or Photography, or search by keyword.
- Click Preview to open a live demo. Click through the pages and switch to the mobile view.
- Click to select or install the theme you like.
Change the theme later
You can switch to another theme for an existing site. SitePad keeps your pages, but layouts built with the old theme's sections may look different, and the new theme may add its own sample pages.
- Note which pages you have edited, and publish or save your current work.
- Open the themes area and choose the new theme.
- Confirm the switch, then review every page in the editor.
- Delete any sample pages the new theme added that you do not need.
- Publish when you are happy with the result.
Tip: To try a new design without risk, create a second website in SitePad on a subdomain such as new.example.com, build it there and switch when it is finished.
Customise global styles
Rather than recolouring every button, set styles once for the whole site:
- Open the site's style or design settings in the left panel.
- Set your primary and secondary colours to your brand colours.
- Choose fonts for headings and body text. Two fonts are plenty.
- Adjust default button style and link colour.
Elements set to use global styles update automatically. Elements you styled individually keep their own settings.
Header and footer
The header (logo and menu) and footer appear on every page. Edit them once and the change applies site-wide. Add your logo, keep the menu short (five to seven items) and put contact details and legal links in the footer.
Troubleshooting
- Theme looks different from the preview: the preview uses demo images and text; replace them with similar-sized images for a matching look.
- Old sections remain after switching: sections stay as you built them. Rebuild those sections with the new theme's blocks.
- Fonts not changing: an element has its own font set. Reset its typography to the global default.