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Core ConceptsFoundations and templates

Foundations and templates

A Foundation is the design system your site runs on. A template is a ready-made starting point built on one. You'll meet both the moment you create a site, so it's worth understanding what each is — and, just as important, what you don't have to do with them.

What a Foundation is

A Foundation determines what your site can do and how it looks:

  • which section types are available (Hero, Features, Blog, Team, Contact…);
  • what options each section offers;
  • how every section is laid out and styled;
  • the overall design system — typography, color shading, spacing, and visual style.

There is no single "the Foundation." Many Foundations exist, each suited to a kind of site — marketing, academic, documentation, corporate. Every site uses one chosen Foundation. Different sites can use different ones, and many sites can share the same one.

You choose a Foundation; you don't build one. Building a Foundation is a developer's job, done with separate tools and documented at docs.uniweb.io. As a creator, a Foundation is simply the palette of sections and the design you're working within — like the design line of furniture in the store analogy.

What a template is (and what it isn't)

"Template" usually means a fixed design you pour your text into — change the words, but don't move anything, or it falls apart. A Uniweb template is not that, and it's worth unlearning the expectation, because it changes how freely you'll work.

A Uniweb template gives you two things:

  • a design system — a curated set of ready-made sections, built to work together, each one configurable;
  • sample content that arranges some of those sections into example pages.

The design system is the real gift. It's a kit of pieces you compose with — add the sections you want, arrange them in any order, configure each one, write your own content. The sample content isn't a mold to stay inside; it's inspiration, there to show you what the pieces can do and give you a running start. Keep it, rework it, or clear it out entirely — the sections are yours to play with.

So picking a template isn't committing to a layout. It's choosing the set of pieces you want to be creative with — and that choice does stick: the design system a template brings is the one the site keeps.

Which sections the editor offers you

Here's the part that makes it feel different from a generic website tool: once your site is on a design system, the editor offers only that system's sections and options — exactly the pieces that belong to the kind of site you're building, and nothing that doesn't. A site built for a bookshop offers bookshop sections; a site for a research group offers people and publication sections. The tool stops feeling generic and starts feeling made for your site. You're never sifting through a thousand irrelevant choices — just the right pieces, ready to arrange.

Nothing about a template's starting arrangement is fixed. Rearrange pages, swap sections, rewrite everything — the polish always comes from the design system, not from the particular content a template happened to ship with.

Template categories

The template picker groups templates by the kind of site they suit — categories such as Landing Page, Personal, Blog and Documentation — and each card is labelled with its kind. A template's preview shows the design system behind it (its code engine) and who made it.

The template you start from does not change what the site costs to publish: that depends on the features you turn on. See Site pricing.

Changing the Foundation later

A site keeps the Foundation it was created with. There is no way to swap it for a different one: the choice is made when the site is created — by the template you start from, or by a design made for you through Create your own website design in the template gallery — and the app offers no control to change it afterwards. A site that needs a different Foundation is a new site.

What you can do is move to another build of the same Foundation, usually a newer one: open the site's Settings, go to Configuration → Foundation, and choose the version — choosing it sets it. The list has earlier versions too, with "— current" on the one in use, so choosing the previous one undoes a change. The app is explicit about the limit — "Only versions of the current package are offered".

⚠️ The choice is saved straight away; only its effect waits for your next publish. Nothing is pending in the app — the live site is what lags until you publish.

The list is sometimes empty, and the card says why: there may be no other registered version of your Foundation, or the version service may be temporarily unavailable.

Newer builds of a Foundation bring fixes and improvements. What a particular build changes is up to whoever makes the Foundation.

What you can and can't do with a Foundation

You can (all inside the app):

  • choose which section types to use on each page;
  • write and edit content in sections;
  • set the options a section offers;
  • brand the site with colors and fonts, and override them per section;
  • organize pages and navigation.

You can't (these are design-system changes, not app tasks):

  • invent a new section type;
  • add an option a section doesn't already offer;
  • change how a section is structurally laid out;
  • add brand controls beyond what the Foundation exposes.

When you need something in that second list, that's a change to the Foundation itself — either switch to a Foundation that already does it, or, if you work with a developer, ask them to evolve yours. It's not a limitation you work around in the app; it's a request through the right channel.

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