Setting Up Your Site

The first time you log in, a short guided setup gets your dashboard ready. It takes a few minutes and you only do it once.

The setup steps

You are walked through your goals, your plan, your website and your domain. You can move back and forth between steps, and your answers are saved as you go — closing the tab does not lose them.

Only an owner can complete setup. If you were invited as an editor, someone has already done this.

If you already have a website

Helm reads your existing site and builds your editable sections from what it finds, so there is nothing to copy across by hand. You will see a preparing your dashboard screen while that runs.

Most of the time it finishes and you carry on. It can also stop short:

• It is still working. The preparing screen stays up. This is normal and it is not stuck.
• It read your site but wants a check first. Your developer reviews what was found before your dashboard opens.
• It could not read your site. Some sites are built in ways that cannot be read automatically. Your developer sets your sections up by hand instead, and your dashboard opens once they have.

In the last two cases the dashboard stays closed until your developer releases it. That is deliberate — an editor full of half-read content is worse than a short wait. If the preparing screen is still there after a while, contact your developer; it is not something you can push past from your side.

If your site was built for you

Clients whose site was built by their developer skip all of this. There is nothing to read, so there is no preparing screen and your sections are in place from the first login.

Welcome tour

Once setup is done, a short welcome screen points out where everything lives. It appears once and does not come back — it is marked as seen the first time you view it, per person rather than per business, so a colleague joining later still gets their own.