Your first day on SGEN
How to spend your first day in SGEN
A 4-6 hour walkthrough that takes you from a fresh install to a brand-aligned site with one published page, your team invited, and a recoverable backup.
This is the curated path for day one — the day after Setup Wizard. Each section is a step from a per-feature reference doc, ordered for the sequence that makes sense on a brand-new site. Every step links back to the source reference for the full click-by-click details. This guide is about ordering and time-management, not about any single feature in depth.
Total realistic time: 4-6 hours, intermittent. You can pause between any two steps without losing progress — SGEN saves are immediate and live on the next public-page reload.
What is this for?
Day one is when SGEN goes from "test install" to "the site I'll show people". The features you touch today are mostly identity, chrome, and first content. Operational features — analytics review, daily order management, content cadence — belong to weeks 2+. This walkthrough sequences the day-1 features in the order that minimises rework.
By the end of the day you will have:
- A real Site Title, Tagline, logo, and favicon replacing every Setup Wizard placeholder.
- A theme swatch close to your brand, with body and heading fonts tuned.
- At least one published page visible at your public URL.
- Your team invited with the right roles assigned.
- A
.sgenbackup archive you can restore if a later edit breaks something.
None of those five outcomes requires any code or technical configuration. Everything happens through the SGEN admin panels listed in Where to go below.
Good use cases
Example 1: A new SGEN customer the day after they signed up. You finished Setup Wizard yesterday. Your domain is pointed (or close to it). Today you want to replace every Setup Wizard placeholder with your real branding, pick a theme close to your brand, upload your logo and favicon, write or paste your first page (often the homepage), invite the rest of your team, and end with a backup snapshot before adding more content tomorrow.
Expected result: your public site loads with your logo in the header, your real Site Title in the browser tab, an About page published at its permalink, and your invited teammates visible in the Users list with the correct role badges.
Example 2: A migrated site mid-rebrand. You imported a backup from another SGEN install and you're standing on real content but generic identity. The day-1 walkthrough re-establishes identity, replaces the Setup Wizard theme with your real brand palette, and gets you to a known-good baseline you can build on.
What this looks like in practice: your business imported a backup from a previous SGEN trial install. The site had three published pages and a blog, but the Site Title still read "My SGEN Site" and the logo was the default placeholder. Working through steps 1-6 of this guide cleared every placeholder in under two hours. The end-of-day backup captured that clean state before the team started populating the shop.
Expected result: the old placeholder Site Title is gone, your new logo is live in the header, and the end-of-day backup captures the re-branded baseline so you can keep building safely.
Example 3: A handed-off SGEN site with stale identity. You inherited admin access to a site whose Site Title still reads "My SGEN Site" and whose logo is a placeholder image. The day-1 walkthrough is the systematic way to clear the placeholders without missing anything — starting from Settings rather than hunting for where each value lives across different panels.
Expected result: every placeholder (Site Title, Tagline, logo, favicon, social links) is replaced with real values; the backup captures that clean state before future edits touch it.
What NOT to use this for
Day 1 gets you to a brand-aligned shell with one page. Pre-launch readiness (SEO, consent, redirects, email) is the Pre-launch checklist, a separate ~2-4 hour pass.
SGEN saves are immediate but not undoable; the backup at step 9 is what lets you recover if a later edit breaks something.
Email/SMTP setup is most useful once you have forms and pages that send notifications. On day 1 there is nothing to send yet — adding SMTP now creates a configuration you cannot test.
Day 1 is one published page (often the homepage). Real content backfill happens in weeks 2-4 once the chrome is settled and you know the design will not change again.
Permalinks set during Setup Wizard are fine for day 1. Restructuring URLs is a deliberate operation with redirect consequences; leave it for the pre-launch pass.
How this connects to other features
Run Pre-launch checklist when you're ready to point your domain at the site for real visitors.
— the next major lifecycle gate after day 1.
Before you start
Before you open the first admin panel, collect these items. Having them ready prevents mid-step interruptions:
- You are signed in to SGEN as an Administrator or Site Owner.
- Your logo file is ready: horizontal orientation PNG or SVG, at 2x the pixel size it will render on screen.
- Your favicon is ready: 32×32 PNG on a transparent background.
- Your real Site Title (what you want in browser tabs and email subject lines) and Tagline (one sentence) are written down.
- Your business address, phone number, and opening hours are written down the way you want them in the footer.
- You have a list of the email addresses of team members you'll invite, with the role each one needs (Administrator / Editor / Author).
- You have allocated 4-6 hours. You can stop and resume between any two steps — progress is saved the moment you click Save Changes.
Where to go
Day 1 touches eight admin areas. The order is set up to minimise "go back and edit" loops:
- Settings → General — identity (10 minutes)
- Settings → Social Media — social links (5 minutes)
- Appearance → Themes — pick a starting palette (5 minutes)
- Appearance → Styles & Layouts — tune typography and colours (15-30 minutes)
- Media Library → Add New File/s — upload logo + favicon (10 minutes)
- Appearance → Header / Footer — wire the chrome to your logo + brand info (15 minutes)
- Pages → Add New — first published page (30-60 minutes)
- Users → Add New User — invite team (5 minutes per teammate)
- Migration → Backups → Create a Backup! — recoverable end-of-day snapshot (5 minutes)
Steps
Open Settings → General. The Identity card asks for the facts that flow into every public page, transactional email, and search result. Replace the Setup Wizard placeholder values with your real Site Title, Tagline, Site Email, Site Logo (you'll come back here at step 6), Favicon, and Timezone.
The Identity card below shows what your General panel looks like with fields filled in:
Scroll down on the same screen to fill in the Business Information card — phone, address, opening hours. These surface in your footer and in local-business structured data that search engines consume.
Click Save Changes in the sticky right-hand column. A green flash confirms the write:
Source: Configure your site's identity
Switch the sidebar from General to Social Media on the same Settings screen. Paste your Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn / X URLs into the matching fields. These surface in the footer wherever your theme calls for social icons.
Only fill the networks you are on — leave unused fields empty and the theme will not render those icons. You do not need a presence on every network to have social icons display correctly for the ones you do use.
Source: Configure your social media links
Open Appearance → Themes. The page opens on the Color Swatches tab. Pick a swatch that's close to your brand colours — you'll fine-tune in step 4. Click the card to select it; the active card gets a red check. Then scroll down and click Save Changes.
Picking a swatch rewrites parts of your Styles & Layouts with the preset's defaults. That's expected and useful on day 1 because there is nothing hand-tuned to overwrite yet. If you do this later on a customised site, see Theme switching safety first.
Source: Pick a theme
Open Appearance → Styles & Layouts. Use the Typography panel to pick body and heading fonts that match your brand voice. Use the Global Colours panel to fine-tune the swatch you picked in step 3 — usually adjusting one accent colour and one button colour is enough. Save before navigating away.
Aim to match your brand guidelines rather than perfecting every detail today. You can return to Styles & Layouts at any time; changes take effect on the next public-page reload.
Source: Customize global styles
Open Media Library → Add New File/s. Drag your logo PNG (or JPG/WebP) and your favicon onto the drop zone. The page reports per-file upload progress. When done, both appear in your library at the top of the grid.
A horizontal-orientation PNG or SVG at 2x the display size keeps the logo sharp on high-DPI screens. A 32×32 PNG on a transparent background is the reliable choice for the favicon. If your logo has a transparent background, PNG is preferable to JPG because JPG does not support transparency.
Source: Upload media
Go back to Settings → General, click Choose Image next to Site Logo, pick the file you uploaded in step 5, repeat for Favicon, then click Save Changes.
Then open Appearance → Header and confirm the header template uses the site logo. Open Appearance → Footer and confirm the footer template surfaces your business contact info.
Once saved, this is how those identity values appear on your public site — logo in the nav, site title in the browser tab, and favicon in the tab corner:
Sources: Configure the header, Configure the footer
Open Pages → Add New. Title it for the page you're creating — usually a homepage or About page. Pick SG-Builder as the template if you want drag-and-drop building, or Text Editor if you're pasting from a document. Set Status to Publish when you're ready to make it live.
The Page Manage form is what you'll see:
If this is your homepage, after saving go back to Settings → General, change the Homepage dropdown from Default to your new page, and Save Changes. The next public-site visitor will land on your new page rather than the default posts feed.
Source: Create and manage pages
Open Users → Add New User. Each user gets a username, email, role (Editor / Author / Administrator), and a generated password you share with them through a secure channel. Repeat per teammate.
After adding your first two teammates the Users list looks like this — each row shows the role and last-login status so you can confirm the invite was received:
Source: Add or edit a user
Open Migration → Backups and click Create a Backup! The archive bundles your current database (all the identity, theme, page, and user changes you made today) and your uploads directory (logo + favicon) into a single .sgen file in your backups/ folder. If anything goes wrong tomorrow, restore this archive and you're back to today's good state.
Rename the archive to something descriptive — for example end-of-day-1-20260427.sgen — so you can identify it at a glance when the list grows. The date in the filename is what future-you will thank past-you for.
Source: Manage backups
What success looks like
By the end of day 1 the following should all be true. The status grid below shows the six checkpoints to verify before you close the browser for the day: Verify each checkpoint in turn: Your real Site Title should appear in the browser tab, not "My SGEN Site". Visiting its URL in a fresh tab shows your content with the branded chrome from steps 1-6. If all seven points are true, day 1 is complete. Close the browser and resume tomorrow with the Pre-launch checklist.
- Identity: open a private/incognito browser tab and visit your public URL.
What to do if it does not work
My logo uploaded but is not showing in the header. Reload the public site with a hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac). Browser caching often keeps the old logo for a few minutes. If the logo is still missing after the hard refresh, re-open Settings → General, confirm the Site Logo field shows your chosen image thumbnail, and click Save Changes again.
My homepage dropdown does not list the page I want. Only published pages appear in the Homepage dropdown. If your page is in Draft or Trash, move it to Publish first under Pages, then come back to Settings.
My theme picker shows one swatch checked but the public site renders another. Re-pick your intended swatch and click Save Changes to force the match. This is documented under Pick a theme → What to do if it does not work.
The backup creation shows no progress or appears to hang. Confirm the Migration module is enabled on your install. If the create-button does nothing visible, check Migration → Backups — the archive may have completed silently in the background. If still missing, see Manage backups for the full troubleshooting steps.
An invited teammate says they did not receive their password. SGEN sends the generated password to the email address you entered during user creation. Check that the address is correct under Users — edit the row and inspect the Email field. If the address is right, the email may be in their spam or junk folder. To resend: remove the user record and add them again with the same email address to trigger a fresh password email.
The social icons in the footer are not showing. Confirm you saved the Social Media screen (a green flash confirms the write). Then confirm your active theme template is wired to display social icons — some themes require you to enable a footer widget separately under Appearance → Footer.
My page permalink returns a not-found error after publishing. Give the server 30-60 seconds to register the new page, then hard-refresh. If the error persists, confirm the page Status is Publish (not Draft) in Pages, and that your permalink does not contain spaces or special characters.
Next step
Citations (audit trail)
Every step above traces to one of these existing per-feature reference docs. The iframe demos embedded above are inline-copied from the cited pile docs.