HIT Strategies CMS  /  Editor Handbook

Editor Handbook

How to build and edit the website — what the blocks are, when to create a page, how to change the menu, and where the line is between what you can do yourself and what needs a developer or designer. New here? Start with the quick-start on the home page.

The idea: pages are built from blocks

A page is a stack of blocks you arrange like building bricks — a hero, some rich text, a stat band, and so on. In a page’s Layout you can add, drag to reorder, and remove blocks, and fill in each block’s fields. You’re composing from a fixed palette — you don’t design new blocks (that’s a developer job; see below).

Block reference

Every block in the palette. The little diagram shows its rough shape — not the exact styling, just what goes where.

The Hero side panel

A panel is the card that can sit beside a Hero’s headline — the navy box with audience pills on the home page is one. It’s part of a Hero block, not a block of its own: you won’t find it in the palette. You turn it on inside a Hero. Every panel lives in exactly one Hero, and it’s off by default.

1. Tick Show panel to turn it on. (Leave it off for a hero with no side card.)
2. Pick a Panel type — this swaps which fields you see:
   • Audience chips — the row of specialty-audience pills (Black Americans, Latinos, AAPI…). Add, remove, and reorder audiences, and set the small heading and footnote.
   • Quote — a pull-quote with attribution. Fill in the quote (don’t type the quotation marks — they’re added for you), the name, and the role / org.
3. The panel heading and subheading show for either type; the rest of the fields change depending on the type you picked.

The panel only shows on the standard hero — a banner hero (one with a Banner image, used for campaign pages) doesn’t show it. Switching a panel from Audience chips to Quote? Update the heading too — it starts on the default audience line (e.g. change it to “What partners say”). On phones the panel stacks neatly below the headline.

Preparing images: photos & logos

The site shapes and crops images for you. Your job is to hand it a clean, un-cropped original and tell it whether the image is a photo or a logo — the layout does the rest.

Don’t pre-crop images into circles or other shapes. If you crop a photo into a circle (for example in Canva) and upload that, the site can’t undo it — you end up with a circle floating inside the card’s rectangle. Upload the full rectangular photo, or the full logo, and let the card frame it.

Then set each Card grid card’s Image display to match the content:

• Photo — the image fills the box, cropping as needed. Best for photographs.
• Logo — the whole mark is fit onto a clean white panel with padding, so it’s never cropped or zoomed. Best for client/organization logos.

Only have a version that’s already cropped into a circle? Use it with Logo display for now — it sits politely on a white panel — but ask the client or source for the original un-cropped logo when you can. And always add alt text (a short description) for accessibility and SEO.

Creating a new page

When: for a genuinely new section of the site (a new program, campaign, or landing page) — not for a paragraph that belongs on an existing page.

1. Pages → Create New.
2. Give it a Title and a Slug — the URL part, lowercase-with-hyphens (e.g. voter-research → /voter-research).
3. Build the page from blocks, then Publish.

⚠️ A new page won’t appear in the menu automatically. Add it under Site Settings → Navigation (below) or it’s only reachable by its direct URL. Don’t reuse an existing slug, and don’t change the Home page’s slug (home).

Editing the navigation, footer & social links

These live under Site Settings (in the Configuration group):

• Navigation — add, drag to reorder, or remove menu links. Each has a label and a link; tick External for links that should open in a new tab (e.g. the Substack).
• Header button — the label + link for the button on the right of the header.
• Social links — the footer badges (label, a short badge like “X”/“IG”, and the URL).

Saving Site Settings rebuilds the site like any other change. Tip: if you clear the navigation or social list entirely, the site falls back to built-in defaults — so the header/footer can never end up empty.

What you can do yourself vs. what needs a developer/designer

Rule of thumb: if you’re arranging and writing existing pieces, that’s you. If you need a new kind of piece or a design/behavior change, that’s a build — ask your dev/design contact.

Best practices

• Batch your edits, then publish once — every publish triggers a rebuild.
• Preview before publishing — layout-heavy pages especially.
• Always add alt text to images (accessibility + SEO).
• Use clean slugs — lowercase, hyphens, no spaces.
• Delete carefully — deleting a published page/member removes it from the live site on the next rebuild.

Questions this doesn’t answer? Contact your site administrator.  ·  Open the admin →