Welcome to StoutStack: A Tour of Your Dashboard

StoutStack is your whole business website in one place: the pages your customers read, your blog, the forms that bring in leads, and everything you need to run it under your own web address. This article gives you a friendly tour of your dashboard so you know where each tool lives before you start building.

What StoutStack is

StoutStack is an all-in-one website platform built for business owners, not developers. From a single, easy-to-use dashboard you can:

  • Build pages: your homepage, About, Services, Contact, and any other page, assembled from ready-made sections you can rearrange and restyle.
  • Run a blog: publish news, articles, and updates, and organize them into categories.
  • Collect leads with forms: contact forms, quote requests, and sign-ups that email you when someone gets in touch.
  • Use your own domain: start on your free web address and connect your own custom domain whenever you're ready.

Everything is designed so you can make changes yourself, in plain language, without touching anything technical.

How to reach your dashboard

Your dashboard is the private control panel where you build and manage your site. Visitors never see it. Only people you invite can sign in.

To open it, go to your site's web address in any browser and add /admin to the end:

  • On your free StoutStack address: yourname.mystoutstack.com/admin
  • On your own domain, once it's connected: yourdomain.com/admin
  1. Type your site address followed by /admin into your browser.
  2. Sign in with the email address and password for your StoutStack account.
  3. Bookmark the page so it's one click away next time.

That's it. You're in. Everything below lives in the menu down the left-hand side.

A tour of the left-hand menu

The menu on the left is your map to the whole dashboard. It's organized into a few simple groups so related tools sit together.

Content

  • Pages: every standalone page on your site, such as Home, About, Services, and Contact. Each page is made of stacked sections you can add, remove, reorder, and edit.
  • Media: your library of images and files. Upload a photo once and reuse it anywhere; anything you add to a page is stored here too, so you can find it again later.
  • Saved Sections: reusable section designs you build once and drop onto any page. Great for something like a "Book a call" banner you want to look identical across the site. Update the saved section and every page using it can update with it.
  • Content Types: your own kinds of content beyond pages and posts, such as Projects, Services, Team Members, or Properties. You set up the fields and the page design once, then add entries. See the Content Types articles.
  • Items: the individual entries for every Content Type you've created, all in one list. This is where you'll add a new project or service day to day.
  • Modals: your library of reusable pop-ups, the dialogs that open when a visitor clicks a button. Build one here and point buttons at it from any page.

Blog

  • Posts: your individual blog articles, news items, and updates.
  • Categories: topic labels that group your posts together so visitors can browse by subject (for example, "Tips," "Case Studies," or "Announcements").

Site

  • Site Settings, the control room for your whole site: your branding (logo, colors, and fonts), your domain, billing, your team, and tracking code. Some of these are reserved for Site Admins. See the related article on who can do what.
  • Users: the people on your team who can sign in, and whether each one is a Site Admin or a Site Editor.
  • Site Menus: the navigation links that appear in your site's header and footer, so you control what visitors can click to get around.
  • Redirects: a way to point an old web address at a new one, so old links, bookmarks, and search results keep working after you rename or move a page.

Forms

  • Forms: where you build contact forms, quote requests, and sign-up forms, then place them on your pages.
  • Form Submissions: a saved record of every message someone sends through a form. It's your safety net: even if a notification email is missed, the message is stored here.
  • Subscribers: the people who've signed up for your newsletter or mailing list.

Advanced

  • Audit Log, a running history of changes made to your site: what changed, and when. It's especially handy when more than one person works on the site and you want to see recent activity.

Everything saves as you work

You don't have to hunt for a Save button. As you type and make changes, StoutStack saves your work automatically about once a minute. When you're ready to share changes with the world, you preview them privately first and then publish. Nothing you edit becomes public until you choose to publish it. You'll find the full walkthrough in the Content & Publishing articles.

Managing more than one site

If your account manages more than one website, you'll see a site picker in your dashboard that lets you switch between them. Whatever site is currently selected is the one you're editing, so glance at the picker before making changes to be sure you're in the right place. Changes only ever affect the site you have selected.

Good to know

  • Your live site keeps running normally while you work in the dashboard. Visitors only ever see what you've published.
  • Bookmark your /admin address so you can get back in quickly.
  • Your menu may look slightly different depending on your role. Site Editors, for example, don't see Site Settings. See the related article on Site Admins vs Site Editors.

Where to go next

Ready to make it yours? Head to the "Your First 30 Minutes: From Blank to Live" article for a friendly step-by-step checklist that takes you from a fresh site to a published one.

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