Master Pages are an essential tool if many or all of the pages on your website need to have the same design elements appear on them. They function similarly to the "master slide" in presentation software like Powerpoint or Keynote, or the master pages in design applications like InDesign or QuarkXPress.

In TIME Sites, a Master Page is like a wrapper around the content on the pages of your website. You can use a Master Page to add content above and/or below as many pages as you want by simply dragging the Master Page onto the destination pages in the site map. 

For example, you may want the same footer to appear on every page of your site. Rather than manually copying the footer to each page, which can be time-consuming, you can simply add the footer to a Master Page, then apply it to every page on the site that needs to have the footer.

If you need to make an update to that footer later on, you can make it on the Master Page itself, and your change will automatically be made to every page of the website that is currently using that Master Page.

You'll find your Master Pages at the top right-hand side of the site map (or list view) when you first open a website.

By default, all new websites begin with one Master Page ("Master 1") applied to every page of the site. Templates may have multiple Master Pages available to begin with, such as "Light theme" and "Dark theme".

You can use the buttons at the bottom of the panel to create a new Master Page, duplicate an existing one, or delete the selected one:

To add a new Master Page to the site, click the "+" button.

Each new Master Page will automatically be named "Master 1", "Master 2", etc. If you want, you can double-click on the name and type to rename it.

Each Master Page will also be assigned an identifying color (you'll see a little bullet next to its name.) This is just an arbitrary color intended to help you quickly identify where the Master Page is in use on the site -- it does not affect the design or display in any way.

To delete a Master Page, select it in the panel and then click the "delete" (trash can) button.

If this Master Page is currently being used by any pages in the site, they will automatically be updated, and will be set to using "None". (The rest of the content on those pages will be unaffected.)

To design a Master Page, double-click on it in the Master Pages Panel. This will open it for editing in the TIME Sites design studio.

You'll see that there's a large "content block" in the center of the stage:

This is a placeholder that indicates where the content on the actual web pages will appear once you've applied the Master Page to them. 

To begin designing the Master Page, just drag elements (text, containers, etc.) onto the stage as normal.

The Master Page can be used to add content above or below the content on your web pages -- It cannot be used to place content within them. So, when you begin placing elements on the stage, you'll only be able to drop them above or below the content block.

You can place as much content as you want on either side of the content block.
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Applying a Master Page is as simple as dragging it from the Master Pages panel, onto the destination page on your site map (or site list.) 

You'll see the page automatically update to indicate the Master Page it's using, displayed below the name of the page:

In the site list view, there's an additional way to control which Master Page is being used, via a dropdown in each row:

Once applied, you'll see that any content in the Master Page will automatically appear on the destination web page.

If you want to clear a Master Page from a page, drag the "None" icon from the Master Pages panel onto the site map.

This will remove whatever Master Page the destination page is currently using. You'll see it update to show "none" under the name of the page.