Parish Settings — How It Works

The three screens

Under Settings in the back office, three entries are about the parish itself rather than any one feature: Parish info, Web address and Design. Each is a single page with a save button, and what you save is live on the public site straight away — there is no preview step. Every one of them has a View public page link at the top for checking the result.

What each one is for

Parish info — name, story, pastor, patron, photos, contact details, links, and the time zone every time on the site is shown in.
Web address — the free Nave address you already have, and the option to put the site on a domain the parish owns.
Design — a colour theme, an accent colour, a typeface, and two choices about how the home page is built.

These screens set the frame; the content inside it has its own pages, and the home page's sections are explained in the Home Page guide.

Who can change them

Access: the Settings row in People & Team → Access.

One row governs all three. Write on Settings can change and save any of them; Read can open them and look, with no save button. The neighbouring Features and Translations pages are governed separately.

Parish info

One long form: identity, diocese, pastor and patron, photos, time zone, contact, links. Every field except the parish name is optional; a blank one simply does not appear.

Name and story

Parish name — required; emptying the box keeps the previous name.
Familiar name — the short form parishioners say ("St. Mary's"), used in the "Ask …" heading. Falls back to the full name.
Tagline and Our Story — the line under your name and the paragraph the home page's story section draws on.
City — appended to your name in the site header.
Diocese, Diocese website and Bishop — shown together under "Beyond Our Parish"; the website is filled in for dioceses Nave knows.
Founded (year) — a number; anything else is ignored.

Pastor, patron and photos

Pastor name, Pastor photo and Pastor biography feed the pastor's introduction; Patron / Patroness name and Patron photo do the same for your patron. Patronal feast day keeps only the month and day — the year is ignored, and the home page counts down to the next one.

The Hero / church photo is the large picture in the welcome banner (whether the banner shows it or a colour gradient is the "Hero style" choice on Design); the Logo sits in the site header, and a square image works best. Uploads accept JPEG, PNG and WebP and are scaled down in your browser before they are sent — a full-size phone photo is fine as it is.

Time zone — the setting every time on the site depends on

Field: Time zone, beside the logo.

Pick the zone your church is in. Every Mass, confession and event time on the public site is shown in that zone, in 12-hour form with the zone named beside it — "5:00 PM PT", never a bare "17:00". The list offers the US zones plus Mexico City and Manila; a zone set outside it still appears, selected, at the top.

Set it once, at setup. It is the zone every time on the site is read and labelled in.

Contact, hours and links

Address, Phone, Email — the office's public contact details. The phone number is tidied into standard US form on save.
Office hours — free text ("Mon–Fri 9:00 AM–5:00 PM PT"), printed in the bulletin.
Online giving link — a Pushpay, Stripe or diocesan donation page. When set, a "Give Online" button appears on the home page.
Facebook and Instagram — footer icons; blank hides the icon.

The fields that speak more than one language

Tagline, Our Story and Pastor biography carry one tab per language the parish has switched on under Features. Write the English; Spanish or Tagalog is generated when you save, and a status line at the top of the form says where things stand — "Translations up to date" or "2 fields out of date — translations refresh when you save".

Prefer your own Spanish? Type it into the Spanish tab. It is then marked Edited and never overwritten until you press Reset to auto. Regenerate now refreshes the generated text without a save. The parish name and patron name have no tabs but are translated too; a rename starts them afresh.

Web address

Every parish has a Nave address from the day it is created. Your own domain is optional, set up from this one screen, and never moves your content.

Your Nave address — already on

The top of the page lists two addresses that always work, each with a Visit button:

Your subdomain — yourparish.nave.live
Also works — nave.live/yourparish

Both are included with the parish and secured automatically — nothing to set up, nothing to renew. The short name in them was chosen when the parish was created; this screen does not change it.

Use your own domain

Needs: a domain the parish already owns, and whoever holds the login for the registrar it was bought from.

Under Use your own domain, type it plainly — stmarysparish.org. No "https://", no "www.": those are stripped, and the site answers on both the bare domain and the www form.
Press Connect domain. The page comes back with "Saved" and a box headed "Connecting stmarysparish.org — two steps".
At your domain registrar, add the two records the box shows — an A record for the bare domain and a CNAME for www. Copy the values from the page.
Tell Nave it is pointed. Nave finishes activation, and the security certificate is issued automatically — usually within a few hours.

Once it is live, the site appears at your domain — same content, same links, same logins — and addresses lose the "/yourparish" part: the calendar is simply stmarysparish.org/calendar, its Spanish version stmarysparish.org/es/calendar.

What the form refuses, and how to undo it

Something that is not a domain — "That doesn't look like a valid domain".
A domain another parish has already connected — "Contact us if that's a mistake".
Any address under nave.live.

Disconnect domain sits below the DNS instructions; it asks you to confirm, then removes the domain. Saving the box empty does the same. Your Nave address keeps working throughout.

"Continue with Google" on your own domain needs one extra step by Nave. Google sign-in is allowed per address, and a parish's own domain has to be added by hand on Nave's side. Until then the Google button quietly does nothing on the custom domain (email and password still work). Mention it when you tell Nave the domain is pointed.

Design

Five choices and one save button. None touches your content; each changes how all of it looks.

Theme — the colour set

The Theme grid shows a catalogue of named palettes — Cathedral, Marian Blue, Sage, Royal Purple, Slate, Rose, Byzantine Teal, Harvest, Sanctuary, and a run of blue-forward modern ones. Each card carries three dots: main colour, accent, page background. Choosing one and saving applies the whole set — headings, buttons, backgrounds and the softer tints behind badges. Nave curates the catalogue; it can grow or be reordered without anything changing on your site.

Accent colour — one knob, and why it is only one

Accent color overrides the preset's accent — the colour of highlights, badges and small fills. Pick any colour: the two lighter tints that go with it (the badge tint and the pale section wash) are worked out from your choice automatically, so a green accent never sits on a leftover gold wash. The tints cannot be set by hand, and need not be; leave the picker on the preset's own accent and its hand-tuned tints are used.

Typeface and hero style

Typeface — Classic (Cormorant, the default), Elegant (Playfair), Modern (Inter), Geometric (Outfit), Rounded (Manrope), Warm (DM Sans), Editorial (Bricolage). The first three change headings only; the rest set body text too.
Hero style — Photo shows the church photo from Parish info in the welcome banner; Gradient uses a wash of the theme colours instead — the right choice until you have a photo you are proud of.

Home page design and Section order — two separate choices

The home page is built from the same pieces for every parish. Two independent pickers decide how they are put together:

Home page design chooses the composition — how the welcome banner is arranged (headline beside the "Today at the parish" card, centred over it, the card on the left, a wide stacked banner, or the photo behind a glass card) and how a few sections are treated (events as a carousel, grid or list; Mass times as cards or a band; ministries as a grid or a compact strip). Ten named designs, each with a small sketch of its banner and events strip.
Section order chooses the sequence of the eight sections between the welcome banner (always first) and the "In communion" band (always last): Numbers, Our Story, Mass Times, Scripture, News, Events, Ministries, Bulletin. Ten named orders — Classic, Liturgy Forward, Community Hub, Warm Welcome, Events Spotlight, Ministry Focus, Heritage, The Word, Bulletin First, Modern Flow — each listing its sections top to bottom.

Leave both on Classic and nothing changes — that is the original design, exactly as it was. Every other choice is the same content, moved or re-dressed; no section is ever dropped, so there is nothing to lose by trying one.

Questions the office asks

I saved Parish info and the Spanish story is text we never wrote

That is the generated translation. Open the Spanish tab of Our Story and replace it with your own wording; the tab is marked Edited and left alone. Reset to auto brings the generated version back.

Times on the site say "PT" — where does that come from?

From the Time zone field on Parish info. Every time on the site is shown in that zone and labelled with it. If the label is wrong, the zone is wrong; fix it there rather than editing the times themselves.

The theme card that is highlighted is not the one we chose

The page highlights the card whose main colour matches what is saved; if the catalogue has changed and none matches, the first card is highlighted instead. Nothing has changed on your live site — but check the highlight before pressing Save design, because saving applies whichever card is selected.

We pointed our domain and nothing happened

Saving the domain and adding the DNS records are your steps; activation is Nave's. Tell Nave the records are in place and allow a few hours for the certificate.

Where are Mass times, languages and the parish's short name?

Mass and confession times live under Mass Schedule — Parish info only sets the zone they are shown in.
Languages are switched on under Features: the Spanish and Tagalog language packs decide which tabs the multilingual fields show and which languages the public site offers.
The short name in your Nave address is not editable here — ask Nave.