Four Designs for Your Share Card

Paste your website into a text message, an Instagram DM, Slack or a Facebook post and a card appears: a picture, your name, a line about you. Most people see that card before they ever see your site, and for a lot of them it is the only part they see.

It is yours to choose now. In your admin, under Website, the share card panel offers four designs.

The four

• Chevron. The design every card has carried until now, with the angled band.
• Split. Your photograph and a panel in equal halves, with a seam of your accent color between them.
• Banner. The headshot full width, your name in a dark scrim across the bottom.
• Spotlight. No photograph at all. Type, color and your name, carrying the card on its own.

Pick an accent color to go with it. It is a separate choice from your site's color scheme, because the card is read at thumbnail size in somebody else's feed and sometimes wants to be louder than your website is.

Spotlight is not only a style

Plenty of sites have no photograph on them yet, and a card with a gray hole where a face should be reads as broken rather than as minimal. Any account without a photograph is put on Spotlight, which is the design built to have none. If you add a headshot later, move to one of the other three.

Refresh Image asks nothing and takes nothing away

There is a Refresh Image button under the card. Press it and your card is photographed again, at 1200 by 630, in about five seconds, in whichever design you have chosen. It used to warn you first, and the warning described losing an image you had uploaded, which was never how this worked: there is nothing to upload here, and the card has always been a photograph of your own card page.

So the warning is gone and the button just works. If the photograph fails for any reason, the card you already have stays exactly where it is and a new one is made for you shortly afterward. You cannot press this and end up with nothing.

What else the card reads

The name on it is your stage name if you have set one. The line under it comes from your profile, so it is worth reading that sentence once with fresh eyes. Everything about how your site looks when it is shared still applies, and your page titles and descriptions are what a search engine reads instead.

Want a site to share? Build one, or look at the plans.