How a Webby Site Fits Together
A shell your whole site shares, and pages that each hold only their own content.
What It Is
Your site is made of two layers.
The shell is everything shared: your header, your footer, the design system, your icon set, your search-engine defaults, and any code you have chosen to inject. There is one shell per site.
A page is one address, and it holds only its own content — its blocks, and the styling and behaviour particular to it.
When somebody visits, the two are assembled into the page they see: your shell wrapped around that page's content.
How It Works
The split is not a technical detail; it decides how much work a change is.
Change a navigation label and you have changed the shell. Every page on the site shows the new label, straight away, with nothing to republish. The same goes for your footer, your colours, your fonts and your icon set.
Change the content of a page and you have changed that page only. It needs publishing before a visitor sees it.
This is why Webby does not ask you to update twenty pages when you rename a menu item.
Why It Matters
Two practical consequences.
First, get the shell right early. The header and footer are generated during setup and are worth the time, because everything you build afterwards sits inside them.
Second, a page carries its own styling. When Webby builds a page it also writes the styling particular to that page — the patterns its sections use, the rhythm of its spacing. That styling is created at the time the page is built, from the design system as it stood then. So if you change your design system much later, pages built before the change may not pick all of it up on their own, and there is a one-click action in Site Settings to bring them into line.
Examples
Renaming a menu item
Shell. Edit the navigation in Site Settings, save, and every page shows it immediately.
Changing your brand's accent colour
Shell. The whole site shifts. Pages built before the change may need the re-apply action to follow it fully.
Rewriting the headline on your About page
Page. Edit it, save, publish. Nothing else on the site is touched.
Adding a testimonials section to one page
Page. It appears on that page only.
Tip: If an edit you made is not showing up live, the first question is which layer it belongs to. Shell changes are live when you save them. Page changes need Publish.
