DocumentationAEMAEM TutorialsAEM Sites WKND Tutorials

Create a site

Last update: Sun Mar 23 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
  • Applies to:
  • Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
  • Topics:
  • Core Components
  • Page Editor

CREATED FOR:

  • Beginner
  • Developer

As part of Quick Site Creation use the Site Creation Wizard in Adobe Experience Manager, AEM, to generate a new website. The Standard Site Template provided by Adobe, is used as a starting point for the new site.

Prerequisites

The steps in this chapter will take place in an Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service environment. Ensure that you have administrative access to the AEM environment. It is recommended to use a Sandbox program and Development environment when completing this tutorial.

Production program environments can be used for this tutorial as well; however, ensure that the activities of this tutorial will not affect the work being performed on the target environments, as this tutorial deploys content and code to the target AEM environment.

The AEM SDK can be used for parts of this tutorial. Aspects of this tutorial that rely on cloud services, such as deploying themes with Cloud Manager’s front-end pipeline, cannot be performed on the AEM SDK.

Review the onboarding documentation for more details.

Objective

  1. Learn to use the Site Creation Wizard to generate a new site.
  2. Understand the role of Site Templates.
  3. Explore the generated AEM site.

Log in to Adobe Experience Manager Author

As a first step, log in to your AEM as a Cloud Service environment. AEM environments are split between an Author Service and a Publish Service.

  • Author Service - where site content is created, managed and updated. Typically only internal users have access to the Author Service and is behind a login screen.
  • Publish Service - hosts the live website. This is the service that end-users will see and is typically publicly available.

A majority of the tutorial will take place using the Author Service.

  1. Navigate to the Adobe Experience Cloud https://experience.adobe.com/. Log in using your Personal Account or a Company/School Account.

  2. Ensure that the correct Organization is selected in menu and click Experience Manager.

    Experience Cloud Home

  3. Under Cloud Manager click Launch.

  4. Hover over the Program you wish to use and click the Cloud Manager Program icon.

    Cloud Manager program icon

  5. In the top menu click Environments to view the provisioned environments.

  6. Find the environment you wish to use and click the Author URL.

    Access dev author

    NOTE
    It is recommended to use a Development environment for this tutorial.

  7. A new tab is launched to the AEM Author Service. Click Sign in with Adobe and you should be logged in automatically with the same Experience Cloud credentials.

  8. After being redirected and authenticated you should now see the AEM start screen.

    AEM Start screen

NOTE
Having trouble accessing Experience Manager? Review the onboarding documentation

Download the Basic Site Template

A Site Template provides a starting point for a new site. A Site Template includes some basic theming, page templates, configurations and sample content. Exactly what is included in the Site Template is up to the developer. Adobe provides a Basic Site Template to accelerate new implementations.

  1. Open a new browser tab and navigate to the Basic Site Template project on GitHub: https://github.com/adobe/aem-site-template-standard. The project is open-sourced and licensed to be used by anyone.

  2. Click Releases and navigate to the latest release.

  3. Expand the Assets dropdown and download the template zip file:

    Basic Site Template Zip

    This zip file is used in the next exercise.

    NOTE
    This tutorial is written using version 1.1.0 of the Basic Site Template. When starting a new project for production use, it is always recommended to use the latest version.

Create a new site

Next, generate a new site using the Site Template from the previous exercise.

  1. Return to the AEM environment. From the AEM Start screen navigate to Sites.

  2. In the upper right-hand corner click Create > Site (Template). This will bring up the Create Site Wizard.

  3. Under Select a site template click the Import button.

    Upload the .zip template file downloaded from the previous exercise.

  4. Select the Basic AEM Site Template and click Next.

    Select site template

  5. Under Site Details > Site title enter WKND Site.

    In a real-world implementation “WKND Site” would be replaced by the brand name of your company or organization. In this tutorial, we are simulating the creation of a site for a ficticious lifestyle brand “WKND”.

  6. Under Site name enter wknd.

    Site Template details

    NOTE
    If using a shared AEM environment, append a unique identifier to the Site Name. For example wknd-site-johndoe. This will ensure that multiple users can complete the same tutorial, without any collisions.

  7. Click Create to generate the Site. Click Done in the Success dialog when AEM has finished creating the web site.

Explore the new site

  1. Navigate to the AEM Sites console, if not already there.

  2. A new WKND Site has been generated. It will include a site structure with a multi-lingual hierarchy.

  3. Open the English > Home page by selecting the page and clicking the Edit button in the menu bar:

    WKND Site Hierarcy

  4. Starter content has already been created and several components are available to be added to a page. Experiment with these components to get an idea of the functionality. You will learn the basics of a component in the next chapter.

    Start home page

    Sample content provided by the Site Template

Congratulations!

Congratulations, you have just created your first AEM Site!

Next Steps

Use the Page editor in Adobe Experience Manager, AEM, to update content of the site in the Author content and publish chapter. Learn how atomic Components can be configured to update content. Understand the difference between an AEM Author and Publish environments and learn how to publish updates to the live site.

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