Editing your site

Who this page is for

Everything else in these docs is written for a developer wiring Louise into a site. This page is written for you, the person editing it—no code, nothing to install. If someone sent you a link to this page, you are in the right place.

Louise is an editor that lives on your actual site. There is no separate admin app to log into and no preview that might not match: you sign in, the page you are looking at becomes editable, and what you see is what visitors get.

Signing in

Go to /louise on your site—so if your site is example.com, that’s example.com/louise—and enter your email address.

You will get a magic link by email. Click it and you are signed in. There is no password to remember or lose.

If no email arrives

The sign-in page says the same thing whether or not your address is allowed to edit. That is deliberate: it stops a stranger using the form to discover who works on your site. So “I entered my email and nothing happened” usually means your address hasn’t been added as an editor yet, not that something is broken. Ask whoever set the site up to add you.

Making a change

Once signed in, editable parts of the page get a subtle outline. Click one and type. That’s the whole interaction—there is no separate form to open.

What you can edit depends on how your site was built, but typically:

• Text and headings—click and type.
• Rich text—longer body content, with bold, italic, links and headings. Select some text and a small toolbar appears.
• Images—click one to replace it from your media library or upload a new file.
• Sections—whole blocks of a page (a hero, a gallery, a row of columns). Depending on the site, you may be able to add, reorder or remove them.

Drafts and publishing

Your changes save as you work, but saving is not the same as publishing.

Edits land as a draft: only you (and other signed-in editors) see them. The live site keeps showing the last published version until you choose to publish. That means you can leave something half-finished, come back tomorrow, and no visitor sees the work in progress.

When you’re happy, publish. The change goes live immediately.

If your site keeps version history, you can look back at previous versions and restore one—useful when a change reads worse than what it replaced.

A few things worth knowing

You cannot break the site by editing it. The worst case is publishing something you’d rather not have; restore an earlier version, or edit and publish again.

Sign out when you’re on a shared computer. An editor session is a real session—anyone using that browser afterwards would be signed in as you.

Changes are attributed. If more than one person edits, the site records who changed what, which is how you work out where a surprising change came from rather than who to blame for it.

When something looks wrong

In rough order of likelihood:

1. The change didn’t appear on the live site—it’s probably still a draft. Check whether you published.
2. You’re seeing an old version—try a hard refresh. Pages are cached at the edge for speed, and a stale copy can linger briefly after publishing.
3. You can’t edit anything—you may have been signed out. Go to /louise and sign in again.
4. Something is genuinely broken—tell whoever maintains the site, and include what you clicked and what happened instead. That pair is almost always enough to find it.