Tutorial: Let's create a Silk site for your team

Silk is great for building websites for small teams. People who work together on different projects need to share and update information fast. In this tutorial we are going to make a Silk site that will help your whole team to keep each other in the loop. If you need any help along the way, don't hesitate to drop us a line.

We will use examples from the Silk site democo.silkapp.com about the fictive company DemoCo to illustrate the following steps. Onwards!

Step 1Create your Silk site

First off, create a Silk site for your team if you haven't done so already. Don't worry about private information: you can make a site private or public, that's up to you.

Pick a free Silkapp domain, and set your site to private if you want

Step 2Add a collection and pages

The information you want to share with your co-workers can probably be put in a few categories or collections. A logical first collection would be 'Employee'. Next, create pages in the collection for each employee.

Steven Hoek is the first employee who got a page on the Democo site

Step 3Add content to your pages

When you edit a page, you can find an 'add your first tag' button on top. Hit that button to enter important bits of information about the employee in question. You can add a position, age, address, and anything else you can think off. Try to use the same tags across your pages: it lets you so cool stuff in the next step.

The rest of your page can be filled with media just like you would create a normal web page. Just click the + icon anywhere on the page and choose a text, image, or media block.

This page has a filled in fact sheet with details about Steven

Step 4Work some Silk magic: insert graphs, maps and tables

If you have a few pages with filled in fact sheets in your collection, the real fun can begin. Silk lets you create charts, tables, and maps using your tagged information.

Your homepage is a suitable place for these widgets, as they give an overview of your employee data. To add them click the + symbol, and pick a table, map, chart, or other widget. You can pick which tags you want to show and filter by in the edit window.

We added several widgets on the DemoCo homepage. Here you can see a map of employees' addresses in Barcelona, and a table showing running projects

Step 5Invite your team members

Now your Silk site is up and running, it's time to spread the word! Send the link to all coworkers, and ask them to join the site so they can contribute. People with a Silk account can also get a daily or weekly digest if you changed your site. Ask them to click the 'follow' button on top of your page.

This concludes our tutorial. We hope this clears up most questions you might have regarding making basic Silk sites. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need some further assistance, or if want to share a thought. Other than that: good luck, and have fun discovering hidden gems in your data!