How Uniweb works
If you understand one thing about Uniweb, make it this: your content and your site's design are kept separate, on purpose. Almost every "why does it work this way?" question traces back to that single decision. This page explains the idea and the few terms that follow from it.
The problem Uniweb is built to solve
Website tools tend to fail in one of two ways.
- Tools that let you change anything (drag-anywhere website builders) feel free at first, but over time the site drifts off-brand. Headings creep in three different sizes, spacing gets inconsistent, one page stops looking like the next. The brand slowly falls apart. There's a name for this: design drift.
- Tools that lock everything down (where you fill in forms and someone else turns them into the actual pages) keep the design safe but leave you stuck. Every change is a request, a ticket, a wait on someone else.
With most tools you're forced to pick: freedom or consistency. Uniweb is built so you don't have to choose — you get both.
The solution: a line between content and design
Uniweb draws a clear line:
- On your side of the line — total freedom. Write and edit content, choose which sections to use, arrange them, set the options each section offers, and brand the site with your colors and fonts.
- On the other side — locked, and safely so. The design itself: how each section is laid out and behaves, and the visual polish that makes every page look like part of one site.
The important part is that this line isn't a rule someone might forget to enforce, and it isn't a permission you could be granted by accident. It's built into how the product works. You have real, satisfying control — and you genuinely cannot break the design, because the design isn't yours to break.
The furniture analogy
The clearest way to picture it: think of furnishing a retail store.
You don't weld your own shelving from raw steel. You get furniture from a supplier — gondolas, endcaps, display cases — all from one coordinated design line so the store looks like one store. Then you arrange the pieces and stock them with your products. You have enormous freedom over the layout and what's on the shelves, and the store still looks cohesive, because the furniture was designed as a set.
Uniweb works the same way:
| In a store | In Uniweb |
|---|---|
| The furniture supplier | The developer who built the design system |
| The coordinated design line | The Foundation (your design system) |
| A gondola, an endcap, a display case | Section types (Hero, Features, Team, FAQ…) |
| Arranging the furniture | Arranging sections on your pages |
| Stocking the shelves | Writing content into sections |
| The store manager | You |
You arrange and stock. You don't build the furniture, and you can't accidentally take a saw to it.
The words used throughout these docs
Everything in Uniweb is a consequence of that separation. These are the words for the pieces:
- Foundation — the design system your site uses: the set of section types available to you, the options each one offers, and the look they produce. You choose a Foundation (usually by picking a template); you don't build it. There isn't one single "the Foundation" — many exist, and different sites can use different ones. See Foundations and templates.
- Section type — a kind of section the Foundation offers: a Hero, a Features grid, a Team directory, a Contact form. It's the kind, like "gondola" rather than the specific gondola on aisle three.
- Section — an actual section on one of your pages: a specific Hero with your headline in it. See Pages and sections.
- Theme — your colors and fonts. Branding lives on your side of the line, so you can make a site unmistakably yours without risking the design. See Theming and branding.
What the separation gets you
Because content and design are separate:
- You move fast and safely. Rearrange a page, rewrite a section, rebrand the whole site — the design stays intact.
- The design can improve without disturbing your content. When a newer build of your design system comes out, you move the site to it in Settings → Foundation; it takes effect at your next publish, and your content stays as it is. Nothing to re-do.
- You experiment freely. Try a different section type, reorder the narrative, rewrite a page. The worst case is that a piece of content doesn't display the way you hoped — never a broken site.
Where to go next
- Pages and sections — the building blocks you work with every day.
- Foundations and templates — choosing and changing the design system.
- How Uniweb compares — if you're coming from WordPress, Wix, or a headless CMS.