Custom website templates

You’ll need: Website templates — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Most businesses never touch this, and that is the correct outcome. This lesson is here so that when you meet it you know what it is and what it costs.

What a custom template is

Your public site normally renders through FeePrime’s built-in themes, which is why setting a brand colour and a logo is enough to get a coherent site.

A website template replaces that with markup you control. The record holds a label, a reference, and a body — the template itself. Point your landing page settings at it, and it renders your public pages instead of the built-in theme.

One template renders everything

This is the part that catches people. A custom template is not a landing page design; it is the whole site. It receives which page it is being asked to render and must handle every case — the front page, list pages, detail pages, lessons, everything.

   one template
        |
        +-- front page
        +-- list pages   (services, updates, courses, shop...)
        +-- detail pages (one service, one post, one lesson...)

A case the template does not handle does not fall back to the built-in theme. It renders nothing — a page with your header and footer and an empty middle, returned as a perfectly successful page. It is a genuinely confusing failure to diagnose from the outside, which is the strongest reason not to own one unless somebody is actively looking after it.

What you get and what you give up

You get a site that looks like nobody else’s, with layout and typography under your control.

You give up automatic improvements. New surfaces added to FeePrime — a new module with public pages, new fields on an existing one — appear in the built-in theme and not in yours until somebody adds them. Your template is a snapshot of what the platform could do on the day it was written.

The rule

If you have a custom template, one named person owns it, and new public features are checked against it before anyone announces them. If nobody owns it, use the built-in theme and spend the effort on your content instead — which is what visitors actually came for.

You have finished

That is the whole of Your Public Website. You now know which screen controls which part of the page, the difference between a page and a post, how services become bookings, who appears publicly and who merely logs in, where your mailing list comes from, and what a custom theme costs.

Keep staging.feeprime.com to hand as you go: every one of these settings is safer to meet there first.

The next course in the catalogue is Products & Offers, which covers the shop — the one public surface deliberately left out of this one.