Start your first website

From the Websites page, choose New website. The wizard has four short steps: your business (its name and the kind of business it is), choose a look, make it yours (colours, fonts and a logo, with a live preview), then create. Choose a look offers two ways to begin: pick a starter design, or describe the business and let AI draft the pages.

A template is the safer start when you want control. It is a finished, ordinary website with placeholder wording: eight designs covering trades, professional services, creative work, food, charities, portfolios and a simple launch page. Every part of it can be changed in the editor, and nothing about it says "template".

The AI route is quicker when you would rather react to a draft than start from a blank page. It writes the wording and lays out the pages from your answers, always as a draft you review before anything is used.

The template gallery groups designs by the kind of business they suit, with a preview for each one that uses your business name. Take the preview through every page before choosing: it is the actual design you will edit, not a photograph of one.

Choosing Use this look copies the template into your new website. From that point it is yours: pages can be renamed, sections deleted and every word rewritten. There is no connection back to the original template, and no way for a change to it to reach your site.

Build with AI asks a handful of questions: what the business does, who it is for, where you work, the tone you want and any look you have in mind. Then it shows a plan of the pages it intends to write, which you can accept before it builds anything.

The draft arrives as ordinary pages in the editor. Prices, testimonials and statistics are left as obvious placeholders rather than invented, so the site never claims something you did not say. Check every page with Click through before publishing, and see the AI guides for how drafts behave everywhere else in the editor.

A website is made on a licence, and the licence is its plan. The trial gives one licence, so the first website needs nothing more. On the last step of the wizard, the Licence box shows the spare licence the website will take, or asks which one when there are several, and the website takes that licence's plan.

If New website is greyed out, no licence is spare. Owners and admins can buy one from the note beside the button, and the wizard carries on once it is paid; the guide New website is greyed out has the other ways forward.

The website name appears in the editor, in your workspace list and in the browser tab. The included address is made from the name, such as your-company.cubesites.site, and works from the first publish.

The address can be tidied in website Settings before the website is shared anywhere. Lower-case words with hyphens work best, for example your-company or your-company-plumbing. Your own domain can replace it later without changing anything else.