How Web Village Works
Web Village was built so that you can build a website quickly and easily. Whether you're adding a page, dropping in a content block, swapping a logo, or fixing a typo - everything lives in a focused admin section:
- Get started by building your page with blocks (drag-to-reorder, selct background, width, spacing with the media library all in one place),
- Manage your content by selecting one of the Templates (with copy, move, multi-language, and bulk edit for blogs and events), and having the pages automatically appear in the navigation
- Make it your own through the Site Settings. Organize your branding, navigation, layout pieces, social media links, language, SEO, and users for managing who can do what.
- Explore what else you can do once you have a handle on the basics
If this is not enough, Page and Block Customization can be done through Admin. Enhance with custom CSS or Liquid to make your site unique. Add new functionality with Phoenix/Elixir. Northern Village Software Services can help you build want you need.
The result is a website builder where editors can pick it up and start contributing the same day, marketers can update content without waiting on a developer, and developers can extend it without fighting the system. The basics are obvious and the advanced features are one click away when you want them.
Build your Page with Blocks
Building a page in Web Village feels like building with LEGO. You compose each page from ready‑made pieces — heroes, text sections, columns, galleries, buttons, even paid downloads — and drag them into place. No code, no blank page to stare at: you fill in the content, rearrange whenever you like, and if you ever need a new kind of section, a developer adds it once and it's available to every site on the platform. It's the fastest way to get from an idea to a page that looks like you meant it.
Editing a page, you will see the page's details at the top including its name, template, and settings like visibility and meta description. Add a new block wherever you need one. To make a change to a block: click on it to edit its text, swap an image, or adjust its settings like layout and colour. Drag blocks up or down to reorder them, hide them, or remove any you don't want. Save when the page looks right.
Yes. Each block is a set of simple fields — text, images, dropdowns, dates, file uploads — so you can edit your block all on one page, and then view the page to see how it looks. You can add new fields when a template needs them, and Web Village automatically includes them in the editor. Some fields pull their options from your data:
- Category dropdowns are populated from your category list,
- File pickers can browse your private media library,
- Image fields let you upload, paste a URL, or pick from your media library.
Repeatable fields make it easy to manage lists like testimonials, gallery images, or buttons in a row. The result is a smooth editing experience.
In several ways — upload from your computer, choose from your library, or pull one in from another site. You can also drop images or files right into the rich‑text editor. Large images are shrunk automatically so pages stay fast. From displaying as an impactful hero image in the Call to Action block, to galleries and carousels using the Gallery Block, or inline in the rich text editor, there are many options throughout to showcase visual content.
Pages can be easily re-arranged within the website menu by drag and drop, duplicated with all blocks and metadata. Blocks inside a page are similarly easily moved by drag and drop in block view, duplicated or moved to another page. Fields inside a block can be re-prioritized with arrows, so you can set up your site fast and make changes easily.
Hide a block and it disappears from that page for visitors so it can be polished or enabled later.
Manage your content
As your site fills up with pages, blog posts, and events, Web Village keeps it manageable. The kind of page you choose — a blog, an events calendar, or a standard page — comes from a template, so the right behaviour is built in from the start. From there your menus build themselves, you can edit a whole blog in one spreadsheet‑style view, group everything with categories, and keep work in draft until it's ready.
Web Village organizes different kinds of content through page templates. Every page uses a template that handles display, features and layout.
- Default is for ordinary content pages (anything you'd build out of blocks.)
- Blog and Blog Post turns a page into a listing of all blog posts
- Events and Events Post work in a similar way with event post being display in upcoming and past events
- Specialty templates like Search to show search results and Redirect sends visitors to another URL.
- Language handles the translation feature.
- Premium templates are available when the regular ones are not enough.
Blocks can be added to any template.
Web Village automatically creates your main navigation from your page structure, which is exactly what search engines want to see. A clear hierarchy that mirrors the way your content is organized, helping with SEO and discoverability. Sub-menus appear automatically for pages with children (except where you'd rather show them as plain links, like blog or events).
When you want more control, you can build a custom menu by choosing the Navigations button in Site Settings. Pick your pages from a list, add external links or a translation button, and drag to reorder. Update your site structure once, and every menu that uses it stays in sync with no manual rewiring or broken links to chase down.
When you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts or events, editing each one individually is a pain. The Bulk Edit view solves this with a spreadsheet-style table of every post or event under it. Each row is a post, each column is a field (name, date, visibility, categories,) plus any custom template fields you've defined.
From any blog or events listing page in admin, click "Bulk Edit" and you get a Edit any cell inline; changes save automatically as you go. Re-tag a backlog of imported posts to the right categories, hide a batch of stale events, reschedule dates across a season, or fill in metadata you missed all without opening each post one by one.
Yes. Categories let you group blog posts or events into named buckets like "News" or "Workshops". A single post or event can belong to multiple categories, and you tag them via dropdowns in the page editor. Each category gets its own public listing page (e.g. /blog/category/news), and categories also appear as filterable dropdowns inside certain blocks so you can show "posts from these categories" anywhere on the site ie. can have news on your home page.
Blogs and events keep have their own categories which you manage from each section's listing page, where a "Create category" button adds a new one.
Set the Hide Future Posts settings so that you can schedule posts for release in the future.
Every page and every block on a page has a simple show/hide option, so you can keep things in draft form that you can turn on when you are ready. Hide a page and it is removed from the main menu, so you can preview your work before turning it on. Hidden pages can be shown in custom menus ie. have a DONATE button and/or translation links in the top bar.
Pages can also be left out of the sitemap individually, useful for things like thank you pages you don't want indexed.
For blogs and events, each post has its own date, and listing pages can optionally hide scheduled posts until that date arrives which is a built-in, to schedule announcements ahead of time.
Make it your own
Your site should look like you. Colours, fonts, your logo, spacing — set them once and every page follows, because every block draws from one shared theme. Change your palette or font in a single place and the whole site updates instantly: no copy‑pasting, no page left behind, no broken layouts. New contributors stay on‑brand automatically, so the site looks polished even as different people add to it.
Your central control panel for everything that's true site-wide rather than per-page or per-block is in Site Settings. Here is where you define your brand -- pick your colors, fonts, logo, and favicon used across the whole site; set the basics like name, address, email, social links, and time zone. You can also set major layout sections (navbar, footer, alert bar, top bar, page header, sidebar) on or off and customize how each one looks and behaves; including a land acknowledgement and "Powered by" credit; manage SEO bits like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, robots indexing, and the default Open Graph image; set the default language and the rules for whether new pages are visible or hidden by default; and configure features like visitor submissions and content categories. In short, Site Settings is the one place to dial in the look, feel, identity, and global behavior of a tenant's site without touching templates or individual pages.
Absolutely. In Site Settings you'll find a Colours area where you set your main brand colours that can be used throughout your site to keep things consistent. You can set 10 different theme colours (default Bootstrap theme colours). If you want to get more precise, set your link and text colours too. So your buttons, links, and highlights all stay on-brand without having to set every element individually. If you change your brand pallette, it is reflected right away throughout your site.
Yes — head to the Typography settings and choose a font for your headings and one for your body text, then nudge the sizing until it reads the way you like. It applies everywhere at once, so your whole site shares a consistent, polished look, and you can change your mind any time.
Your branding lives together in Site Settings. Upload your logo and it drops into your header; add a favicon for the browser tab; and set your site name and a social sharing image, so shared links show your image and name instead of a blank box. Paired with your colours and fonts, that's the whole package — set it once and it carries across the entire site.
What else can you do?
A few things live at the site level rather than on any one page — your site's name and logo, your colour and font choices, contact details, search‑engine basics, and your connections to the open social web. Set them once and they apply everywhere, so the whole site pulls from one source of truth.
Web Village handles search-engine basics out of the box, so you can focus on content.
Each page has its own meta title and meta description, plus an Open Graph image for how it looks when shared on social media, and you can choose whether or not it appears in the sitemap. The site automatically generates a /sitemap.xml listing for every published, visible page so search engines can crawl them (or specify not to crawl), and a site-wide "noindex" toggle lets you hide a whole site from search engines while it's in development. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager IDs can be added in Site Settings to drop tracking onto every page without editing templates. Behind the scenes, Web Village builds a content preview from each page's blocks and maintains a Postgres full-text search index, so the built-in admin search and any on-site search features stay accurate as content changes. Defaults like a fallback Open Graph image and a default blog post image keep things looking sensible when individual pages don't override them.
Yes — your posts publish out to the open social web (Bluesky and the Fediverse). Also, when someone replies to your post on Bluesky or in the Fediverse, those replies come back and appear as comments under your post, so the conversation lives on your site too. See the open social web page for the full picture.
Web Village lets a single site run in multiple languages without maintaining separate sites. Your main language stays at the root of the site, and then you set up a "language page" at the top of each language section (one for Latvian, one for French, etc.), and any page underneath automatically inherits that language. UI text like buttons and headings comes from per-language template files (lang-en.liquid, lang-fr.liquid …), so adding a new language is just dropping in a new file. For content that needs translating, you copy and existing page to a different language section and it keeps all the files and images and links them together; a language switcher then lets visitors jump straight to the equivalent page in another language.
Bonus capability is that it is possible to change the user prompts by editing the lang-en.liquid template file.
Finally, if you want to move a page to a different language tree, copy the page to the new tree, and it reuses the assets of the page, and it also links the two pages. So, clicking on a language link will take a visitor to its corresponding page in another language.
Accessibility is built in, not bolted on. Web Village has a clean structure, image descriptions, readable colour contrast, and keyboard-friendly navigation come as standard. That means a better experience for every visitor, and it helps you meet accessibility expectations like Ontario's AODA.