The builder workspace
A tour of the Genesis builder — every toolbar button, panel, and control around your live preview.
The builder is where you spend your time: chat on the left, live preview in the middle, and a toolbar of tools across the top. Here's the full map.
Top toolbar, left to right
Project & page
- Logo — back to your projects dashboard.
- Project name — display only here; rename it in Settings → General.
- App switcher — if the project holds more than one app (Website, Web app, Mobile app, Desktop app), this picks the one you're working on. It is also where you add one. Everything below — chat, preview, pages, settings, publishing — follows your choice. See Apps inside a project.
- Page selector — switch, create, and manage pages and folders. See Pages & folders.
Canvas tools (center)
- Viewport switcher — Desktop / Tablet / Mobile preview, which also controls responsive style editing.
- Inspector toggle (eye) — turn click-to-select on the preview on or off. Switch it off when you want to use the page (click links, test forms) instead of editing it.
- Theme Colors — open the theme editor for your site's palette and typography.
- Version History (clock) — browse and restore earlier snapshots.
- Code Editor (brackets) — open the built-in code editor.
Utilities (right side)
- Reload Preview — full preview restart (~10–30 s). Use it if the preview ever gets stuck.
- Performance — run a Google PageSpeed audit per page, with one-click AI fixes. See Performance audits.
- Insights — click heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings (requires Analytics to be on).
- Project Settings (⚙) — shortcut to Project Settings; which tabs open depends on your role.
- Client Review — share a live preview link and collect comments. See Client Review.
- Undo — appears after an AI change; rolls the project back to before the last AI turn, showing how many files it touched. More in Version history & undo.
- Publish — build and deploy your site. See Publishing. After a successful publish, a green Open site button appears next to it.
- Bug report — send us a report with context attached if something misbehaves.
- Profile — your avatar: remaining credits (with a Manage link), billing & invoices, log out. Account settings open in a panel over the builder, with billing, allocation and credits together in one Allocation & credits tab — see the dashboard.
Note
On narrower windows, the utility tools collapse into a ⋯ overflow menu — everything is still there.
The left panel
The left panel is your AI chat — and it transforms into other panels when you open them: Theme Colors, Live Controls, Version History, Client Review, Performance, the Blog post manager, and page settings all open here. A collapse button (chevron) hides the whole panel when you want a full-width preview.
For everything the chat panel itself can do — slash commands, attachments, suggestion chips, per-turn revert — see Chat panel features.
Working from your own machine?
The ESTAGE Genesis desktop app — Mac, Windows and Linux — lets the AI read images straight off your disk or out of your Photos library, save exports where you want them, and capture your screen instead of you uploading screenshots. It is also what runs a desktop-app project in a real window while you build it.
If the preview fails to load
Rarely, the in-browser preview can fail to boot (some VPNs and strict browser setups block it). You'll see a "Preview couldn't load" screen with two options: Reload, or Restore a version from history. Your project files are safe either way — this only affects the preview.