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Websites · what you make and manage

The whole site, made from inside the site.

Pages and posts, your catalogue and its listings, pictures, typefaces and what search engines are told — all of it opened and changed by you.

See plans and pricesTalk to us about a site What it reads from the office

Everything you make

Made here, kept here, changed here

Every one of these is a thing you open, edit and put live yourself, from the same place you edit your pages.

What people read

Pages
Written, laid out and put live from inside the site. Each one keeps its own address, and can be set to go live on a date or come down on one.
Posts
With their own categories and tags, a picture, an author and a summary. A post being written saves itself as you go, and can be trashed and pulled back out of the trash.
Testimonials
What a customer said, who said it, where they are from and how many stars — kept in their own groups, and placed on any page that earns them.
Listing pages
One page laid out once, answering on an address of its own for every item on a list, with its own filters and its own order. What the list may be is the one thing on this page worth reading twice, and it has a section to itself further down.

What a page is built out of

Blocks
The bands a page is stacked from. Keep one and it can go on every page at once, changed in a single place.
Saved looks
A button, a card, a heading, set the way you want it and given a name. The next one matches without anybody remembering the settings.
Pages to start from
A page you liked, kept whole. New pages begin from it with their own copy of everything, so changing the new one never disturbs the old.
Pictures and files
One library with folders, a trash you can pull things back out of, and a note against each picture for people who cannot see it. Pictures are made the right size for whatever screen asks for them.

How the site is dressed

Colours
Set once, for the whole site, along with what a button and a card look like before anybody styles one by hand.
Typefaces
Upload your own, or pick one from the usual free library — either way it is fetched once and then served from your own site rather than borrowed from somebody else’s every time a page opens.
The top of every page
Built in the same way a page is, out of the same blocks, with a light version and a dark one and its own behaviour as the reader scrolls.
The bottom of every page
The same again — your footer is a block you edit, not a strip somebody has to be paid to change.

How it is found, and how it is kept

What search engines are told
A title and a description for the site and for every page on it, what to show when a page is shared, which pages to keep out of search, and what the robots file says.
Old addresses
Point anything that used to exist at whatever replaced it, so a link somebody printed two years ago still arrives somewhere.
Who can sign in
Visitors sign in with a one-time code sent to them — no password to forget, reuse or leak — and you decide what they are asked for when they join.
A copy of the whole site
Your pages, your blocks, your pages-to-start-from, your colours and your old addresses, in one file, whenever you want one.

How a page is built

A page is a stack of blocks, and the blocks are yours

Nothing on a page is welded to it. A band you like becomes a block you keep, and a page you like becomes a page you start the next one from.

A block you keep
Put the same one on every page, and change it once. Or unhook a copy from the rest and it becomes that page’s own, with nothing else following it.
A look you keep
A button, a card or a heading set the way you want it, given a name and used again. The site stays consistent without anybody being careful.
A page to start from
A whole page kept as a starting point. It carries its own copy of everything, so a page begun from it is independent from the moment it exists.

Nothing you do is final

Every save, every publish, and a way back from each

Visitors read a copy taken the moment you pressed publish, so a page left half-changed for a week never shows. Work the run below — putting a version back is the thing worth trying.

Every version of one page

Today · 11:04

Published · Rate list

The monsoon rates went live, with the picture at the top swapped for the new one.

Its address
/rate-list
On the site
Yes, and going back does not change that

This is the one on the site.

A long afternoon of edits is one version rather than one for every time you pressed save, so the run stays readable. It goes back a good way, not forever — the oldest versions drop off as new ones arrive, which is why the copy of the whole site further down is a different thing and not the same thing said twice.

Who touches it

More than one person can run the site, and the site remembers which one did

Everybody who works on it signs in as themselves, and what each of them may do is set by you. Somebody can be given the run of the builder and still not be able to put anything live — they make the change, you publish it. Somebody who only writes the posts sees the posts.

Behind that sits a record that is only ever added to. It holds who did the thing, what the thing was and what it was done to — a page put live, a block changed, pictures uploaded, an old address pointed somewhere new, a typeface added. The name is written into the entry at the time, so the record still reads properly a year later when that person has left and their account is gone.

The builder also opens in one place at a time. Open it again in another window and it tells you where it is already open before it hands over, which is how a second window of your own never saves over the first.

And when you want the whole thing in your hands, the site exports as one file — your pages with their blocks, the blocks you keep, the pages you start from, your colours and your old addresses. The pictures stay in the library rather than travelling inside the file, which is worth knowing before you assume the file is the whole site.

Where it stops

What a site standing on its own cannot do

We would rather say these now than let you find them out in month three. Neither is a fault waiting to be fixed — both are the shape of the thing, and both stop being limits the moment the site is joined to your office.

Forms with many fields

A long enquiry form is written in the office, not in the site

The signup for a newsletter is the site’s own and needs nothing else — an address or a number, a one-time code to prove it, and the consent kept against it. A form with a dozen questions is different. Those are written in KaryalayOne and the site shows the one that is there today, so a question added on Monday is on the site on Monday without anybody rebuilding a page. What somebody fills in goes straight to your office as it is sent; the site does not keep a second copy of it for you to reconcile later.

On its own, a site can take a signup. It cannot take a long form.

Lists a page builds itself from

The kinds of list are a fixed set, and most of them are the office’s

A listing page builds itself from a list rather than being laid out item by item — your catalogue, your customers, your orders, your invoices. That is the whole point of it, and it is also the limit: the kinds of list are decided by us, not invented by you, so there is no way to declare a new kind of thing and have pages build themselves from it. The ones that belong to the site rather than to the office are its posts and its testimonials, and both of those work on a site joined to nothing at all.

On its own, a site can build listings from its own posts and testimonials. The rest arrive with the office.

Tell us what you will be changing

How often the wording moves, who in your office should be able to move it, and whether anything on the site has to come from your counter. That is enough for us to say what the site takes.

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