Themes & branding

Your custom themes and the default library sit side by side as colour-swatch cards. Use a library theme as-is with one click, clone & customise it into your own, or start a custom theme from scratch — and a cloned theme can always be reset back to the library original.

Want a whole starting site, not just a look? Browse the ready-made club website templates in the template gallery.

The theme editor is a mock club homepage drawn in your theme: click the navigation bar, a heading, a card, a button or the footer, and its settings open beside the canvas. Pick colours with a swatch picker or paste a hex value — a palette row under every picker holds your brand colours, so a button variant can reuse a saved colour in one click.

Choose fonts from a searchable list of fonts your site serves, set heading sizes, weights and corner radii, and flip between desktop and mobile viewports as you go. Custom variables — and JSON export/import — are there when you want them.

Choose from twenty open-licence font families served from our own servers, plus the system fonts, so the font you pick is the font every visitor sees, on every phone. Theme default puts a field back to the standard font.

On the Pro plan, upload your club’s own fonts as WOFF2 files, up to 500 KB each and one per weight, once you confirm the club is licensed to use them on a website. Move to a lower plan and they are kept but not used; they return when you move back.

Set the space between sections (Compact, Standard, Roomy or Spacious), a shadow and border for content cards, and a smallest and largest size for headings and body text, so type scales smoothly from phone to desktop.

The Style book tab draws every kind of section you can add to a page in the theme you are editing, unsaved changes included, so you see the whole site before you save.

Choose how the top of every page is laid out: logo left with links right, a centred logo with links below, links centred with buttons on the right, or a split menu around a centred logo. Give it a background in your primary colour, light, dark, or light with a coloured rule. Then pick one of four footers: columns, centred and compact, columns with a sponsor band, or a single minimal line.

The navigation editor previews each choice as you pick it. On a phone every layout keeps the standard compact row, so the menu button is always where a thumb expects it.

Any section in the main column of a page can take a style: a hero for the opening banner, an accent band in your brand colour, a narrow column for long reading, two columns, or a full-width image. Styles switch on for your site the first time an admin picks one, so nothing on an existing site changes until you choose, and the picker says so in plain words when a style could make text harder to read.

On the Pro plan, Theme → Custom CSS takes a site-wide stylesheet of up to 20 KB, and any section in the main column can carry up to 2 KB of its own. Every rule is checked when you save and again each time the page is served, and the editor lists anything it removed and why.

The limits keep a stylesheet from breaking the site or reaching beyond it. It can’t import other stylesheets or load web fonts, it can use images only from your own uploads, it can’t pin fixed or sticky overlays over the page, and it applies to your public site only, never your admin screens. Move to a lower plan and your CSS is kept but not shown; it comes back when you return to Pro.

Branding follows you across every surface: the public site, transactional emails and the member portal all pick up your club logo and branding automatically. Buttons track your brand colours until you deliberately restyle them, so changing your primary colour re-dresses the whole site in one move — your club colours as a website theme, without a designer on the committee.

A version history records every saved change, with one-click restore to any earlier look, and menus keep a version history of their own, so a navigation change can be rolled back the same way. And a built-in readability check stops you saving body text that fails accessibility contrast against your page background — so an enthusiastic rebrand never makes the fixtures unreadable.

The Helix Assistant can restyle the site from a plain-English request — “match our jersey colours” — with a full preview before anything saves.