At the end of this walkthrough you will have one page written in Leed and live on your site. The work takes a few minutes; the build that carries it to your domain takes a couple of minutes more, and runs on its own while you do something else. Nothing here depends on your plan — every step works on Free.
1. Sign in
Go to app.leed.ai. The sign-in screen offers three routes: Continue with Google, Continue with GitHub — which signs in accounts that already exist and cannot create one — and an email magic link. Type your work email, clear the anti-spam check, and Send magic link becomes available. The emailed link expires after five minutes; request another if you are slow to your inbox.
If you were invited to an existing workspace, use the link in your invitation email rather than this screen — Joining and Switching Workspaces covers what happens after you accept, including the case where an administrator has to finish setting your account up.
Once you are in, Leed decides where to send you. If you belong to exactly one workspace it selects that one and moves on; if you belong to more than one you get the organization picker and choose. You can switch later from the profile menu on the avatar at the bottom of the rail — Switch Organization only appears there when you actually belong to more than one.
Sign-in has more routes and more failure messages than fit here. Signing In covers all of them, and Sign-in Troubleshooting lists the errors verbatim with what each one means.
2. If this is a brand-new workspace, wait for setup
A workspace you just created is not ready the instant you verify your email. Leed shows an Initializing Data screen — “This could take a couple minutes…” — while it provisions everything the site needs: your site repository, two workers and their hosting (one for the live site, one for preview), your domain’s routing, a starter set of page types, and a first page so the workspace is not empty.
The status line under the heading is the only moving part, and it cycles through four states:
- Preparing your workspace…
- Setting up your workspace…
- All done! Redirecting…
- Something went wrong. Please contact support.
The screen polls on its own and forwards you when it finishes; you do not need to reload it. Your Workspace Is Being Set Up lists everything provisioning builds and the starter content you land on. If you have no account yet, creating one asks for a site title and a domain — both are explained there.
3. Where you land
Signing in takes you to your home tab, which is Know until you change it. Down the left edge of the window is the rail, and it has five tabs:
Know · Design · Engage · Plan · Deploy · Chat
Everything in this walkthrough happens under Design, and only the last step goes near Deploy. The rest of the rail is covered in Touring the Workspace, and the seven library sections behind Design in the Design Workspace.
4. Create a page
Open Design. The panel on the left is your content library; the dropdown at the top of it chooses which part you are looking at. Pick Site — that is your pages — and click the ＋ New page button.
The New Page dialog asks for exactly three things:
| Field | Required? | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Page Name | Yes | The page title. It also seeds the page’s slug, which you can adjust afterwards in Page settings. |
| Page Type | Yes | Decides the page’s URL structure and the layout it renders with — a documentation page and a blog post behave differently. |
| Labels | No | Grouping, series membership and access scope. You can add them later. |
Which page type you pick decides your page’s URL and layout — see Page Types — and Labels and Series explains the three separate jobs a label does.
Submit, and the page opens in the editor with a gray DRAFT badge next to its title.
5. Write
Type on the canvas. The row of controls directly under the page title is the formatting toolbar — headings, lists, tables, code blocks, images, alerts, diagrams and the rest.
One thing that catches people out: markdown shortcuts do not work in the editor. Typing ## at the start of a line leaves you with the literal characters. Headings, lists and everything else come from the toolbar. Every control on that toolbar is enumerated in the Editor Toolbar Reference, including the ones that fold into a kebab menu when the window is narrow.
If a colleague opens the same page, you will see their avatar in the header and their cursor on the canvas. Autosave, presence and the lock that protects a page while it publishes are covered in Autosave, Collaboration and Locking.
6. Fill in the summary
Open the right rail and choose the Page settings tab — on a page you just created, Leed opens it there for you. Under Metadata, fill in Summary. Keywords are optional but cheap to add now.
This is a step rather than a suggestion because a page type can mark fields required. If any are missing when you try to publish, Leed stops you with a Missing fields dialog naming them.
The rest of the right rail’s fields — slug, feature image, authors, contributors, redirects and permission overrides — are in Page Settings.
7. Publish
The publish control sits in the top row of the document header, beside the status badge. It gives you two choices: publish now, or pick a date and time in the future, which schedules the page instead of publishing it.
Publish now, and two things happen: the status badge changes, and a deployment is queued.
| Badge | Color | Means |
|---|---|---|
| DRAFT | Zinc | Written but never published — not on your site at all. |
| IN REVISION | Orange | Live, with unpublished edits on top. Readers still see the last published version. |
| SCHEDULED | Violet | Will publish by itself at the time you set. |
| PUBLISHED | Green | Live, shown with the date it went out. |
Scheduling a page for later has rules of its own — see Publishing and Scheduling a Page.
8. Watch it go live
Open the Deploy tab. The card at the top of it is the whole publishing model in one picture: Preview site and Your edits side by side, above a full-width Live site.
Your publish appears in the history below, first as an in-flight row and then as a completed one. It takes a couple of minutes, because Leed does not patch one page into your site — it rebuilds the whole thing from your content and your templates and swaps the finished version in. Then load your page’s URL.
How Publishing Works traces the whole pipeline, and Every Deployment Is a Full Rebuild explains why the wait exists and why it does not grow much as your site does.
What just happened
You created a page under a page type, and the page type is what decided its address and its layout. You typed into a draft, which autosaved continuously and stayed private the whole time. You published it, which turned that draft into the page’s live version and queued a deployment. That deployment rebuilt your entire site and activated the result. And nothing between the first keystroke and the publish was ever visible to a reader — which is the one rule the rest of these docs are built on.
Those words in bold are the working vocabulary of the product, and Core Concepts defines each one properly in the order you meet it. For the shape of the whole system rather than the words — the CMS, your site repository, your published site and the AI layer, and how a change travels between them — read How Leed Fits Together. For the wider picture this quick start skips, go back to What is Leed?. And when you are ready to spend real time in the editor, the Page Editor is the page to read next.