Your club's website (public pages)

Use Reach → Website to manage the public pages on your club website. Website opens on Public pages; its other tabs are Hours (see Hours & closures), Documents (see Sharing club documents) and Old links (see Old links).

Open a page, update its title, text, links, or page blocks, then preview it before publishing. Keep key information such as joining, pool hours, visitor rules, and contact details current.

The Text, Image and text and Contact sections have a writing box. Select the section on the page and the box opens in the panel beside it. It is the block editor: type / on an empty line for headings, lists, pictures, a gallery, buttons, callouts, toggles, videos and dividers, and select words to format them or add a link. How each block works, the keyboard shortcuts, and how pictures and pasting behave are in Writing with the block editor.

Pictures inside a writing box come from your club's media library.

Pages written before this editor open in it with their headings, lists, links and pictures carried over. Until someone saves such a page, visitors see it exactly as before, and nothing changes for them until you publish.

If a writing box holds something that can't be saved, the bar at the top of the page says "Not saved." with what to fix, and Save draft and Publish wait until you fix it.

The picture in a Banner or an Image and text section, and the photos in a Photo gallery section, use a simpler picture box: Upload image (or Replace image) takes a picture from your computer, and Describe the image is where you write its description for screen readers. These boxes don't open the media library window. A Photo gallery section holds up to 24 photos, each with an optional caption.

A Map section (under Content in the list of sections) shows where the pool is. It has a Heading (it starts as "Find us"), an Address of up to 200 characters, and an optional Note for parking or directions. A new Map section starts with the street, city, state and ZIP from Club → Club info if you have filled them in; change it if the pool is somewhere else.

Visitors see the address, your note and an Open in Google Maps button that opens the address in Google Maps in a new tab. Where the page has finished loading they also see a Show map button, and only when they press it does the map appear on the page (pressing it again hides it). Until then nothing is sent to Google, so a visitor who only wanted the address shares nothing with Google. There is no map key to set up and nothing to pay.

A Map with no address is left out of the page for visitors, and the check before you publish lists it ("has no address yet").

While Programming is turned on for your club, an Upcoming events section lists up to six published programs that haven't finished or been canceled. Ongoing programs count as today; the list then sorts by start time and title. Someone who isn't signed in sees only a program's name and dates (and the time, for a one-day program) and a link to sign in; a signed-in member of your club gets a link to the program. Preview-only, draft, ended and canceled programs are not listed. You don't add anything to the page: the section's heading is still the words you wrote. See Programming registrations.

In a page's settings, Menu decides where its link shows on your website, and Menu position sets the order (lower numbers come first):

• Header menu puts the page in the menu across the top.

• Footer puts it in the links along the bottom of every public page, after Member sign in. A contact page is a good fit.

• Not in a menu keeps the page off both menus. People can still reach it if you link to it, or share its address.

A page you haven't published never shows in the menus. A page marked members only shows in the menus only for members, former members, staff and instructors who are signed in (see Members-only pages below). The footer also always carries links to your Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy; you don't add those, and if you also put those two pages in the footer menu they aren't shown twice.

A member who is already signed in sees something a little different on every public page. In place of Member sign in and the join button they get one My portal button, and the footer drops its sign-in and join links. The same goes for buttons on pages you build: a button to the sign-in page reads My portal for them, a button to the join page is left out, and a call-to-action or join section whose only button is "join" is not shown to them. In the editor you always see your buttons as you wrote them. Your members-only pages also appear in the menus for members, former members, staff and instructors, on every page. Someone on your waitlist who has signed in gets the My portal button too, but not the members-only pages. A visitor who isn't signed in sees Member sign in and the join button as before.

The News link in the header appears once the news page has something to show: at least one newsletter that has been sent and is shown on the website, or newsletter signup turned on in Settings (the news page is where visitors sign up). Until one of those is true there is nothing for it to open, so it stays hidden.

Grouping pages under another page

A page in the header menu can be shown under another page in the header menu, so a long menu stays short. Open the page under Reach → Website → Public pages and use Show under: choose the page to list it beneath, or Top level to show it on its own.

On a computer, the other page keeps its own link and gets a small arrow beside it. Selecting the arrow opens the list of pages under it; Esc, a click elsewhere, or moving on to another page closes the list. On a phone the menu sits behind a Menu button, and opening it shows every page with the grouped ones listed under their page. Your footer menu stays a plain list.

• Groups go one level deep. A page that is already shown under another page can't be chosen, and a page that has pages under it can't be put under another page. Move those pages first.

• Show under applies to pages in the header menu only. Moving a page to the footer or off the menus takes it out of its group.

• If the page a group hangs from is not in the menu for a visitor (it isn't published yet, it is members only, or you moved it to the footer), the pages under it show in the main menu instead. Nothing you've published disappears from the menu.

• The home page isn't in a menu, so it can't be grouped or have pages under it.

Some things you add while building a page only matter while you are editing, so visitors don't see them:

• A Photo gallery shows only the photos you have added. With none added, the whole section is left out.

• An Image and text section with no picture shows just its heading and text, across the full width.

• A question in Questions and answers with no answer yet is left out, and the section is left out when none of its questions have answers.

• A Documents section shows everyone, visitors included, the documents set to Anyone, no sign-in needed. The rest of your club's documents show only to members, former members and staff who are signed in. When there is nothing a visitor may see, they are asked to sign in. Someone on your waitlist who has signed in sees only the documents for anyone, the same as in the member portal.

The page editor still shows the empty picture spaces and unanswered questions so you can fill them in.

Every "join" button, in the header, the footer, a banner or a Join the waitlist section, uses the wording of your join page: Join the waitlist for a club with a waitlist, Apply for membership for a club that takes applications. That follows the membership setting in Settings. A button you reworded yourself keeps your words.

New clubs get a home page that starts as a draft. Until you publish it, visitors see the standard home page that comes with Swim Ops, not an error. Staff who are signed in see the draft and can edit it from the page, and Publish makes it the home page visitors see.

A connected tool such as Claude can read a page and save a new draft of it for you, which visitors do not see. It can't publish: its request to publish waits for someone on your staff to approve it. What it can and can't do with pages and pictures is in What Claude can and can't do here.

A page you are editing is a draft. Visitors keep seeing the last published version until you press Publish. Save draft keeps your work without changing what visitors see.

Discard draft throws your unpublished edits away and puts the editor back to the version visitors see now. It asks you to confirm first, and it is switched off when there is nothing to throw away, for example on a page you have never published, which has no earlier version to go back to. Every save, publish, and discard is kept in the page's history, so you can restore an earlier version from the page list if you change your mind.

If the saved draft of a page can't be opened, saving or publishing is refused with "The saved draft of this page can't be opened, so saving now would replace it. Nothing was saved." Restore an earlier version from Public pages, or discard the draft to start again from the published page.

Changes to published pages are visible to visitors. Check links and dates before you publish. Use Branding for club colors and logo, and Hours & closures for day-to-day schedule information. See Branding.

When you press Publish, Swim Ops first reads the page for things a visitor would run into. This happens in the editor and on a page's card under Reach → Website → Public pages. If it finds anything, you see a list and two choices:

• Go back and fix closes the list and leaves the page as it is, so you can change it.

• Publish anyway publishes the page as it stands.

A warning never stops you from publishing. A page with nothing to report asks the usual "Publish this page?" question and goes live.

Each line says which section it is about, counting from the top of the page ("Section 3 (Cards, card 2)"), so you can find it. It looks for:

• Placeholder wording nobody replaced. The text a new page or a new section starts with, such as "Write the page here.", "Program name", "First card", or "Add a sentence or two about…". Wording that works as it is, such as a "Contact us" heading, a banner headed "Welcome", or a join button, is not flagged.

• Links to pages visitors can't open. A link to a page of your site that isn't published yet shows visitors "page not found", and so does a link to an address where there is no page. A link from a page everyone can see to a members-only page asks the visitor to sign in instead of showing it. Links to your join page, sign-in, the member portal and the news page are always fine, and links to other websites are not checked.

• Questions with no answer, and empty picture spots. Visitors don't see these (see "What visitors don't see" above), so the page ends up shorter than it looks in the editor. The list tells you which ones.

From the editor, the check reads the page as you see it now, saved or not. From a page's card under Public pages, it reads the saved draft. After you publish from the editor, anything still on the list stays at the top of the page ("Published. A visitor might still run into:") until you change something. When someone approves a connected tool's request to publish, the tool gets the same list back.

To keep a page for your members, open it under Reach → Website → Public pages and set Who can see it to Members only.

Members only means your members, your former members, your staff and your instructors, once they are signed in. Nobody else can open the page or see it in the menus:

• A visitor who isn't signed in is asked to sign in first, and then arrives on the page if they are a member.

• Someone on your waitlist can sign in to the member portal, but a members-only page tells them it is for club members and opens once their membership starts.

Anything an applicant should read before joining belongs on a page set to Everyone.

Each page has a Description in its settings: one or two sentences, plain text, up to 300 characters. Search engines can show it under the page's title, and it is the text in the preview when someone shares the page's link in a message or on social media. Leave it empty and the page has no description of its own.

The preview also uses the page's title, your club's name, and the picture from the first Banner section on the page that has one. Only the version of the page that is published counts, so publish after you change the banner picture.

Your club's website can answer at more than one address, for example yourclub.swimops.app and an address on your club's own domain. Your public pages tell search engines which one is your main address, so they should list each page once, at that address. It's a strong hint, not an order, so search results can take a while to catch up. You don't need to do anything. The main address is the one Swim Ops sets when it switches on your own domain. See Using your own domain name.

Your website also gives search engines a list of your public pages (a sitemap) and points them to it automatically. It is at the same main address and lists every published page that everyone can open, with your home page first. Your home address is always listed, even before you publish a home page of your own. Other drafts and members-only pages are left out. It updates by itself when you publish or unpublish a page, though search engines can take a while to look again.

If newsletter signup is turned on under Club → Club info, visitors can add their address from the club's news page. They are then sent one message asking them to confirm, and the club cannot email them until they open it and select the link. That is on purpose: anyone can type someone else's address into a form, so the confirmation is what proves the mailbox belongs to the person who signed up.

New signups appear under Reach → Messages → Audience. Someone who has not confirmed yet is on the list but is not emailed. See Why a message didn't send.