For websites on GitHub Pages
Your website, kept up to date by the people who run it.
Write articles and the verse of the day. Change the phone number on your home page. Let visitors send messages and prayer requests. All without code, without Markdown, and without calling whoever built the site.
Made for the people behind a website, not the people who built it
- Churches and ministries
- Small businesses
- Clubs and community groups
- Writers and families
How it works
Set it up once. After that, it's just you and your words.
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1
Connect your website
Whoever built your site links its GitHub project, which takes a few minutes, and invites you. You never have to see GitHub yourself.
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2
Add what you need
Somewhere to write, like Stories or Verse of the Day, and forms for messages or prayer requests. Each comes with the code to put it on your site, and a preview of how it'll look.
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3
Write, change and publish
Everything saves as you type. Press Publish, or schedule it for later, and your site updates itself a minute or two afterwards.
Every kind of writing
A blog and a verse of the day, on the same site.
Each section gets its own form with only the fields it needs, its own page on your site, and its own list here. An article has a teaser and a photo. A verse has a reference and a reflection. A poem keeps every line break where you put it.
Write a week of verses on Sunday afternoon and schedule them, and each one goes up on its own morning.
Every page, too
See something to change? Click it.
A new phone number, this season's opening times, a photo of the new hall. Open the page, click the words or the picture, change it, and press Publish.
Only what you changed changes, so whoever built your site finds everything else exactly as they left it. Change a phone number and the link that dials it changes too.
Visitors write back
Contact forms, prayer walls and comments.
Add a contact form, a sign-up sheet, a prayer wall or a guestbook, or turn on comments for a section. Whatever people send comes to your team first.
Keep it private, or put it on your site once someone's approved it. Spam robots are caught and quietly turned away, and email addresses are never put on your site.
On your site, in its style
Show it anywhere, looking like it belongs.
A link in your menu, today's verse on the home page, the latest stories as cards, or a form beside the posts it collects. Pick a look, see a preview with your own writing, and copy the code.
There are looks for sites built with Bootstrap or Tailwind, and plain ones that take on your site's own fonts and colors. Once it's in, it keeps itself up to date.
Features
The hard parts are handled.
- It looks like writing
- Bold is bold and a heading looks like a heading. You'll never see a line of code unless you go looking for it.
- Now or later
- Everything saves as you type. Publish when you're ready, or pick a day and time and it goes up by itself.
- Drafts stay private
- Nothing reaches your site or your public GitHub project until you press Publish. Not a word.
- Photos just work
- Drop one in. We resize it for the web and remove the location data phones hide inside photos.
- A team, with roles
- Admins set things up. Writers write and publish, and never need a GitHub account at all.
- Know what's waiting
- Messages to read and posts to approve show up on your home page, and admins get an email when something arrives.
- Nothing is overwritten
- If someone changes the same thing on GitHub while you're working, you're shown both, and nothing is lost.
- Safe to change your mind
- Edit a live article for days and readers see the old version until you publish. Or take it down and keep the draft.
- Works with hand-built sites
- Plain HTML sites and Jekyll sites alike. Your existing pages are never rewritten, only the words you change.
Your site stays yours
Everything you publish is a plain file in your own project.
There's no special database holding your writing hostage. Each article goes into your GitHub project as an ordinary Markdown file, exactly where a developer would put it. Approved prayer requests and comments are ordinary files too.
Stop using writePage tomorrow and your website carries on as if nothing happened. And your helper can keep editing the same files with whatever tools they like, because we pick up their changes too.
Questions
Good to know
Do I need to know anything about GitHub?
To write, publish and change your pages, no. Connecting the site takes a few minutes on GitHub once, and we walk you through it. If someone else built your site, they can do that part for you, then invite you.
Which websites does this work with?
Websites hosted on GitHub Pages, where the site's files live in a GitHub project. That includes sites built by hand in HTML: your existing pages aren't rewritten, and new sections are added alongside them.
Can I change things that aren't articles, like our phone number?
Yes. Open the page in Pages, click the words or picture you want to change, and publish. Nothing else on the page is touched, so it keeps the look whoever built it gave it.
How can a website that's just files have forms?
Forms on your site send to writePage. A contact form or questionnaire stays here for your team. For a prayer wall, guestbook or comments, what you approve is added to your site as ordinary files, and your site shows them.
What about spam?
Forms quietly check that a person sent them: robots fill in a hidden box people never see, skip a check that runs in the visitor's browser, or send the form faster than anyone can type. Anything that looks like a robot's goes to a spam folder, with no email and nothing on your site, and clears itself after a month. Your visitors never have to pick out traffic lights. And on a form that shows posts straight away, anything even slightly doubtful waits for you to approve it.
Will it change how my site looks?
New pages borrow your site's header, footer and styles. Anything you add to a page comes in the look you choose, with a preview first. Your existing pages stay as they are.
What can it get to on my GitHub account?
Only the one project you approve for that site. We can't see your other projects or your account settings, and you can revoke access from GitHub whenever you like.
How long until something I publish shows up?
Usually a minute or two. GitHub rebuilds your site each time, and we watch it happen and tell you when it's live. Or schedule it, and it goes up on its own.
What if I stop using writePage?
Your website keeps working. Everything you've published is already in your GitHub project as ordinary files. Forms would stop taking new posts, and unpublished drafts are the only things that live here alone.
You have something to say. Go say it.
Connect your website in a few minutes, or ask whoever built it to, and start this afternoon.