KaryalayForge · the software our websites run on
The people who wrote it answer the phone.
KaryalayForge is the website platform our business websites are built and hosted on — written by us and still kept by us. It is not sold, licensed or priced separately. It is here so you know who is behind your site, and who fixes it when something is wrong.
What it is
One piece of software, not a shelf of parts
A website is usually assembled. The pages come from one maker, the pictures from another, the shop from a third, and each of them keeps its own timetable. This one is cut from a single block: what divides it inside are divisions we drew, not seams where somebody else’s work begins.
The control room you work in and the pages your customers read are the same piece of software, written in one place, using the same words for the same things throughout. That is not a detail about how it was made — it is why a price cannot mean one thing where you typed it and something else where a customer reads it. There is one meaning of it, and it is written down once.
Why it matters to you
The questions that only have an answer if one company wrote it
None of what follows is really about software. It is about what can be done on the afternoon something is wrong, and who has to do it.
The page has moved, and the old address is on a printed card.
Old addresses go on a forwarding list, so somebody typing the one off the card lands on the new page instead of an error. When a post’s address changes, that forward is written for you — nobody has to remember to arrange it.
Something changed and nobody remembers who changed it.
There is a record of what was done, by whom and when. It is only ever added to — entries cannot be edited or tidied away — and it still names the person after they have left you, because their name is written into the entry rather than looked up afterwards.
You want your own copy of all of it.
Your pages, the layouts you saved, your settings and your forwarding list write out to a single file you keep. Read it back and, unless you say otherwise, it adds rather than replaces — nothing already there is touched. Your pictures and files stay where they are, in your own library.
Two windows open on the same afternoon.
The second one is told the editor is already open somewhere else, instead of the two of them quietly writing over each other’s work and one of you finding out on Monday.
A photograph straight off a camera goes on a page.
It is cut down to the size the visitor’s screen actually needs and sent in a lighter form, the first time anybody asks for it. Nobody has to know that this is a thing to worry about.
Nobody here knows anything about being found on search.
What search engines read is written out of your own settings — what the site is called, what each page says about itself, which pages should be listed at all — and it is put together fresh every time it is asked for. There is no file somebody has to remember to rebuild.
Before anything goes out
Nothing you are working on is live until you say so
What your customers are reading is a copy, taken at the moment you published it. Move things around all afternoon and the shop window does not change. It changes when you press publish, and not before.
- Or on a morning you choose
- A page can be told to appear on a date, and to come down again on another one, without anybody being at a desk when it happens.
- Shown to one person first
- A page that is not public yet can still be handed to somebody by link, so it can be read and argued about before the world sees it.
- What you see is what they get
- The page you are moving things around on is drawn by the same software that draws it for your customer. Not a preview of it — the same drawing.
The record
Every version is kept, and putting one back is itself a version
Saving keeps a version. Publishing keeps the one that went out. Putting an older one back is written down as a putting-back, with the time and the person who did it — so the history can never quietly rewrite itself.
- 12 Aug · 09:14SavedPriya
- 12 Aug · 11:02SavedPriyaThe one you can go back to
- 12 Aug · 11:40PublishedPriya
- 13 Aug · 16:25Put back to 11:02Ravi
It is the recent history rather than everything since the site opened — the oldest versions fall off the end, and we would rather say that here than let you discover it looking for something from two years ago.
Keeping the record never gets in the way of the work, either. If the history cannot be written for some reason, your save still goes through. A safety net that can stop you working is not a safety net.
Beside it, and separate from it, is the plain record of who did what and when. That one cannot be edited at all.
It is not on the price list, and there is nothing on this page to buy. KaryalayForge is not something we hand over — it is something we keep, so that keeping your site working stays our job and not yours.
There is no licence here, no copy to install, and no version of it for you to look after yourself. It is not sold on its own and it is not something to go and build on. It is on this site for one reason: so that before you ask us to build you a website, you know who wrote the thing it will run on, and who you will be ringing when something needs doing. What we build on it →
Tell us what the site has to do
What you sell, who has to be able to find you, and what you want to be able to change yourself once it is up. We will tell you what it takes.