Building and publishing your site
You start from a finished site, not a blank page. Everything after that is replacing the placeholder words and pictures with yours, previewing until it looks right, and pressing publish.
Editing is safe; publishing is the commitment
Nothing you do in the editor is visible to the public. Your changes live in a draft, you can preview the whole site as often as you like, and the live site stays exactly as it was until you publish. That's why building is free — you subscribe when you're ready for the world to see it.
The pages you get
Your site is one document that produces a set of pages:
| Content pages | Home, Issues, About, Events, Donate, Volunteer, Sign Request, Contact |
| Legal pages | Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, Governance |
On Kickoff, your site publishes as a single page — Home, plus the legal pages. That's the plan's shape, not a fault: everything you write still lives in the document, presented as sections of the home page instead of separate pages.
The useful consequence is that nothing breaks and nothing is lost. A link that would have gone to /issues becomes a jump to the Issues section of your home page rather than a dead link, and all your content is still there. Move up a plan and those sections become full pages, with the words you already wrote on them.
A site that collects an email address needs its privacy policy, whatever it costs. Those four pages publish on every plan.
What happens when you publish
Pressing publish runs a sequence, and it stops at the first thing that isn't right rather than putting a half-correct site online:
- Your subscription and ownership are checked. No active subscription means no publish — that's the line between building and going live.
- Your committee is checked. Publishing is blocked until your registered committee is confirmed. See your committee and your disclaimer.
- Your site is built to a staging area — not to the live address.
- Every built page is checked for accessibility, including the "Paid for by" disclaimer.
- Only then does the new site replace the old one, and the change reaches visitors within moments.
Because the check happens on the built pages before the swap, a failure publishes nothing at all. Your existing live site is untouched — you are never left with a broken half-published version.
If the accessibility check stops you
You'll get a list of specific problems rather than a generic refusal, and each one names the page and what to change. The usual causes are ordinary:
- Colour contrast — most often a theme colour you picked yourself. Text has to be readable against what's behind it, and Electbase checks the actual values rather than assuming.
- A missing image description — every meaningful image needs a short description for people using a screen reader.
- A missing or empty disclaimer — the Footer block is where it lives.
This check exists on every plan and isn't something you can turn off. It's also the reason an Electbase site is accessible by default: it is verified at the moment of publishing, not promised in a brochure.
An inaccessible campaign site is a voter who can't read your platform, and in many jurisdictions it is also a legal exposure. Fixing contrast before launch costs minutes.
Publishing in Spanish
If you've turned on the Spanish version, it's built and checked alongside the English one. If the Spanish variant hits a problem, your English site still publishes — a translation issue is never allowed to hold up your actual site.
After you publish
Your site is live at your yourname.electbase.com address immediately, or on your own domain if you've connected one. Publishing again replaces it the same way, with the same checks. There's no queue and no approval step.
If two people publish at the same moment, the second one stops rather than overwriting the first — so a colleague pressing publish while you are mid-swap cannot produce a mixed site.