User guide

Your guide to Architectena

Everything the platform offers, what each part is for, and how to get the most out of it — in one place.

What is Architectena

Architectena is the professional network for architects and designers. It brings together the things scattered across a dozen other tools — a feed of ideas, a portfolio for your work, a jobs board, office pages, communities, a résumé, a places atlas, and direct messaging — into one place built specifically for the architecture world. It's free to join and use today (optional paid plans are listed on the Pricing page; paid checkout isn't live yet), in English or Arabic.

First steps

  1. Complete your profile — add a photo, cover, profession, country and a short headline. A complete profile gets far more views and follows.
  2. Build your résumé — education, experience, skills and certifications. It is created for you automatically; just fill it in.
  3. Share something — publish your first post or upload a project to your portfolio.
  4. Follow a few people — architects, offices and groups whose work interests you. Your feed gets better the more you follow.
  5. Explore — browse jobs, offices, groups, the Q&A and the Situ map to see what the community is doing.

The home dashboard & feed

Your home page is your command centre: a personalised greeting, quick links, trending content, suggestions of people to follow, and your activity stream. The feed has three tabs:

Following — posts from the people, offices and groups you follow.
For you — personalised recommendations based on your field, your groups and what you engage with.
Topics — posts filtered by the topic tags you subscribe to.

What you can do — the services

Posts

Share ideas, articles, tutorials, critiques and questions with images and attachments. React, comment, save and follow topics. Drafts, scheduled posts and author-only private posts are supported.

Open Posts →

Projects

Build a visual portfolio. Each project has a cover, gallery, location, year, programme and team — and can be linked to an office. Images are optimised automatically.

Open Projects →

Jobs

Find or post work. Filter by field, country and salary, view listings on a map, save searches for email alerts, and apply with a full form or one-click Quick apply — which the person who posted the job can switch off per listing.

Open Jobs →

Offices

Create a page for your firm — logo, cover, description, staff, portfolio, reviews, news and job board. A new office is submitted for review and goes public once an admin approves it; you can also save it as a draft only you can see. Follow an office and its news reaches you as soon as it is posted; new projects, jobs, press and awards are collected into one email digest that goes out on Monday mornings rather than notifying you each time. An office that is at least two weeks old and has some substance to score carries a 1–5 rating badge, and that badge is a percentile rank against the other rated offices, not an absolute mark — so your tier can move up or down as other offices change, even in a period when nothing about yours has. Newer offices show “New” instead and are left out of the ranking entirely. Tap the badge for the full breakdown.

Open Offices →

Groups

Join or start communities around a topic, city or school. Post, discuss and react with members; admins and moderators manage membership and announcements.

Open Groups →

Q&A

Ask practical questions about codes, materials, methods and practice — and answer others. Questions and answers can be voted both up and down, so the most useful rise and the unhelpful sink.

Open Q&A →

Situ — Places

A shared architectural atlas. Pin buildings and sites you find significant with notes, photos and coordinates; browse everyone's pins on a world map and discuss them.

Open Situ →

Hall

The canon of the discipline — a reference on notable architecture and the people behind it, written by the community rather than curated from above. Any signed-in member can add a topic, suggest an edit to any section, vote on other members' suggested edits, request a topic nobody has covered yet, comment and follow. What you publish goes live straight away; moderators review what gets flagged.

Open Hall →

Résumé

A living CV with education, experience, skills, languages and certifications. Use the Public/Private pill in its header to control whether other members can see it. Export PDF builds the file on our servers and downloads it — your email and phone are printed in it only if you have marked those fields public.

Open Résumé →

Messaging

Direct and group chats with other members — text, links and attachments, with read receipts and typing indicators in real time. One-to-one direct messages are end-to-end encrypted by default; see Privacy & safety below for what that means for your password.

Open Messages →

Your spaces & tools you might miss

Beyond the public sections, the platform gives you private working spaces and tools that are easy to overlook — here are the most useful:

Workspace

Your private workspace — five tools nobody else can see: Todo lists with priorities and deadlines, personal Projects with a version-update history, one-off and recurring Reminders, Kanban Tasks with checklists and labels, and a Vault for your own files. The Vault holds up to 3 GB on the free plan; uploads are refused once you reach it.

Open your Workspace →

Office workspace

If you run or work at an office, its Studio is a closed workspace for the team — manage staff and roles, post jobs, add projects, and see who's engaging with your page. Open it from the Manage button on your office.

Go to Offices →

Global search

One search bar across the whole platform — it searches ten kinds of thing: people, posts, projects, jobs, groups, offices, companies, products, Hall topics and Situ places, with instant previews as you type.

Open Search →

Connections manager

Followers, following, follow requests, and your mutes, restricts and blocks — review and manage every relationship from one screen.

Manage connections →

Recruiter dashboard

Posting jobs? This is a read-only overview of how your hiring is going across every listing — the application funnel by stage, your acceptance rate, average days from apply to first interview, and your busiest jobs. You review, shortlist and respond to individual applicants on each job's own applicants page, not here.

Open recruiter dashboard →

Settings & privacy

Control your account, language, notification preferences and what each part of your profile shows — plus your follow requests, mutes and blocks under Privacy & moderation → User management. Account privacy itself is toggled from the lock control on your own profile.

Open Settings →

Security

Protect your account with two-factor authentication and one-time backup codes, and review the devices signed in to your account — each session is signed out individually, and there is no single sign-out-everywhere button. Sessions started with Google sign-in are not listed here.

Open Security →

Engaging with content

React — posts have six reactions — Like, Love, Insightful, Curious, Funny and Dislike — and you hold one at a time. Projects have a Like and a Dislike. Q&A answers can be voted up or down. Situ places take a single Helpful upvote that raises the best pins.
Save — bookmark anything to read later, and file your saved items into named collections. Your bookmarks.
Comment — join the conversation. Comments post live, and you can edit or delete your own at any time.
Share — copy a link or share to other apps. Shared content shows a rich preview.

Connecting with & managing people

On every profile you'll find a row of controls. Each icon's shape and colour show the current state, and hovering any icon explains exactly what it does. From gentlest to strongest:

Follow — see their posts in your Following feed. On private accounts your request waits for approval. Click again to unfollow.
Mute — a slashed grey bell means you've muted them: their posts and activity are hidden from your feeds. They are not notified. A normal bell means not muted.
Restrict — a gold closed lock means restricted: a quiet limit where their comments on you show only to them, their messages go to your requests folder, and they can't see your online or read status. They are not notified. An open lock means not restricted.
Block — the strongest option: they can't see your profile, follow you, or message you, and you won't see theirs. Manage your block list in Settings → Privacy & moderation → User management, on the Blocked tab.
Report — flag a profile or content to the moderators. Reports are private; the person is never told who reported them.

Notifications

The bell in the top bar shows new activity in real time — follows, comments, mentions, job and office updates, and more. You decide exactly what reaches you:

Preferences — turn each type of notification on or off, and choose email frequency, in Notification settings.
Quiet hours — hold back push buzzes and instant emails during the hours you set, so you're not disturbed at night. Notifications still land on the bell while quiet hours are on — nothing is lost — and the once-a-day email digest is deliberately exempt, so it still arrives at 09:00 your time.
Mute a thread — stop notifications about one specific post or conversation without affecting anything else.

Privacy & safety

Private account — make your account private so your full profile is hidden from people who do not follow you, and you stop appearing in people search and suggestions. Note that posts you publish are still public — use a post's own Private setting to restrict a post. Toggle account privacy from the lock control on your own profile.
Field visibility — hide individual details (phone, email, links) from your public profile while keeping them on file.
Encrypted direct messages — save your recovery code — One-to-one direct messages are end-to-end encrypted by default. Only you and the person you're messaging can read them; our servers store them scrambled and cannot read, search or hand them over. The key that unlocks them is derived from your password, on your device, so the first time you open Messages you are shown a one-time recovery code. Save it: if you ever forget your password and reset it, that code is the only way to get your old messages back, and if you lose both your password and your recovery code, your past direct messages cannot be recovered by anyone — including us. That is the trade-off that makes them genuinely private. Every other kind of conversation — group chats, job threads, post and project threads, office threads and office-env team and client channels — is not end-to-end encrypted, because those need search and moderation.
Moderation — explicit imagery is automatically detected and removed, and reported content is reviewed by a moderation team. Be kind — the Community Guidelines apply to everyone.

Account standing — warnings, suspensions & deletion

Architectena is built to stay safe and professional, so a small set of rules is enforced. Almost no member ever runs into this — but here is exactly how it works, so there are no surprises.

What can lead to action

Posting explicit or pornographic images — these are detected automatically and removed.
Repeatedly posting content that has to be removed for breaking the rules.
Harassment or abuse — including being blocked by a large number of members.
Spam, impersonation, or other violations of the Community Guidelines.

Being reported on its own does not punish anyone — reports go to human moderators who decide, and reporting is private: the person is never told who reported them.

How it escalates, and for how long

Warning — a first, minor issue gets a heads-up. You keep full access.
Temporary suspension — continued violations pause your account for a set time. Suspensions escalate in length: a first one is short (around 10 days), then roughly 20 and 30 days for any that follow.
Permanent ban — reserved for repeat or serious violations after several suspensions. Your content stays on record and you can still appeal.

What a suspension is like

You can still sign in, but you will see a page showing the reason and a live countdown to when access returns — your account unlocks automatically when the time is up. If you believe a suspension or ban is a mistake, you can appeal right from that page and a moderator will review it.

Deactivating or deleting your own account

This is always your choice, and separate from moderation. From Settings you can deactivate your account — that hides your profile and content and signs you out, and you can reactivate it anytime just by signing back in; nothing is deleted. Or you can permanently delete your account, which removes your profile, content, and uploaded files for good.

Read the full Community Guidelines →

Tips to get the most out of Architectena

Keep your availability badge current — it signals recruiters and offices that you're open to work.
Save searches on the Jobs board to get email alerts the moment matching roles are posted.
Subscribe to topic tags so the Topics feed surfaces exactly what you care about.
Add projects to your portfolio regularly — they're what offices and peers look at first.
Switch the interface between English and Arabic anytime from the language menu.

Still have a question?

Browse the FAQ for specific how-tos, or reach out and we'll help.

Read the FAQ Contact us