A Bell Entry Waits to Be Found. A Card in the Corner Interrupts
Cards now appear in the bottom right of the admin, each carrying a design worth a look and a button that takes you to it.
They are deliberately not part of the notification bell, and the distinction is the part worth explaining. A bell entry waits patiently to be found, which is right for "somebody sent you a message". A card interrupts what you were doing and carries buttons, which is only acceptable for something you might act on right now. Different purposes, different lifetimes, so they are kept separate rather than sharing one list. Dismissing a card is per-account and permanent.
Three things had to be fixed before the button led anywhere
All three turned out to affect more than these cards, which is usually how this goes.
The design override only worked from an administrator's address. So the Preview button would have sent a customer to the demo site and shown them the demo account's own design, not the one being advertised. Preview access is granted by a signed token now, sticky for the session so clicking around the demo keeps the design you came to see, with the preview bar left visible as the way back out.
The preview bar had no way back to the catalog. It now carries "Go to design selection", which is the entire point of sending somebody to look at a demo site in the first place.
The custom-domain redirect was discarding the path and the query string. This is the one that mattered beyond previews. A link to /yourname/resume landed on the home page. Any preview link arrived as nothing at all. It carries both now, and only the bare /username form stays a redirect.
That third one had been quietly breaking every deep link into a custom-domain site, which is to say every link anybody ever shared to a specific page rather than to a home page. It was found because a preview link did not work, and it was never really about previews.
What they are for, and what they are not
They advertise designs. That is the whole scope today: here is a template that suits the kind of work you do, here is what it looks like, here is how to switch.
They are not a message channel. Anything that is actually addressed to you, a visitor message or an account notice, goes to the bell where it will wait until you read it. Putting real correspondence in something that can be dismissed with one click would be a bad trade, and a card that appears too often stops being read at all, which is the failure mode every notification system eventually finds.
Related: real-time alerts, notification counters and visitor messages in the dashboard, which are the bell side of this.
For actually changing design, preview any template for a day and the catalog cover images. Browse the catalog or create a free actor website.
