Publish a site

Publish puts your file online as a real website anyone can open, at its own address on uxdeck.site. Each screen becomes a page, and everything you set up plays as it does in Preview: links, motion, effects and Blocks. There is nothing to install and no hosting to arrange.

Only the file’s owner can publish it. Everyone else sees Export in that place instead.

Publish for the first time

1. Press Publish at the top right of the editor.
2. Read the groups in the dialog (below): Site details, Before it goes public and, when a typeface needs it, Typefaces. None of them stops you.
3. Press Publish.

The button shows each stage: Preparing the site…, compressing any large video, Uploading the files, then Going live…. You can close the dialog and keep working: the publish carries on, with its progress in the tray at the bottom right.

The site gets its address the first time you publish. It is made from the file’s name unless you chose one in Site settings.

Before you press Publish

The dialog checks the site and tells you what it finds. You can always publish anyway, and republish once things are fixed.

• Site details: whether the site has a title, a description and a tab icon. Set up site takes you to the missing field in Deck settings > Site; Publish opens again when you come back.
• Before it goes public: the coach’s last pass over the site. It flags text that is hard to read against its background, controls or pictures with no name a screen reader can say, tap targets smaller than a finger, screens with no phone version, screens still called by a placeholder name, screens with no way back, and pictures that could not be copied in. On a computer, Review the findings on the canvas opens them in the Review tab; on a phone, each finding shows a small picture of its screen. Each layer named is a link to it on the canvas.
• Typefaces: a typeface that is not uploaded to your workspace shows in a system font on the site. Press Upload font and choose its .woff2, .woff, .ttf or .otf files, or Add from this computer where the font is installed. In a team, the owner or an admin uploads fonts. See Fonts.

Once it is live

The file shows a Live badge in the top bar, and on its card on Home. Press it, or Publish, to open the dialog, which now shows:

• the site’s address, with buttons to copy it and to open it;
• when it was published;
• Your own domain, to open it at an address such as www.yourname.com too (Pro). See Your own domain.

Changes you make in the file do not reach the site until you press Republish.

Put back an earlier version

Under Earlier versions, each version shows when it was made. Press Put back and that version is live again at once. uxdeck keeps the five newest versions, the live one included.

Unpublish

Press Unpublish in the Publish dialog, or in Deck settings > Site > Danger zone. It asks first. The address stops working for everyone at once and the earlier versions are deleted. The file itself is not touched, and you can publish again later on a new address.

Moving the file to the trash or the archive takes its site offline too.

What each plan allows

What	Free	Pro
Sites online at once	1	10
“Made with uxdeck” badge	Yes	No
Your own domain	No	Up to 3
Password	No	Yes
Analytics	7-day totals	Full, up to 90 days

On Free, the badge sits on every page with a link to uxdeck and a Report link. If you go back to Free with more sites than it keeps, you have 14 days to choose, in Settings > Plans, which site stays online; after that the others go offline (your most recently published one stays if you do not choose).

Catches

• Your latest version may wait for a quick look. Sometimes, often for a new account’s first site, the dialog says it is waiting before it goes live. It usually takes less than a day.
• A site that breaks the rules is taken down, and the dialog says so. Write to me if you think it is a mistake.
• Large videos are compressed in your browser before they go up, which can take a while. Each file on a site can be up to 15 MB.
• Fonts you have not uploaded fall back to a system font. Check the Typefaces group before you publish.
• Unpublishing gives up the address. Publishing again later puts the site on a new one, and old links stop working.