Websites · what a site is made of
The parts, not a portfolio.
A Karyalay business website is built out of strips — bands stacked down a page, the parts that go on them, and the same page drawn narrower.
What you are looking at
A page is a stack of strips
Every page is a run of full-width bands in the order you put them in, each setting its own height and background. The header and footer are held once for the whole site.
A band is the unit that moves, so putting the enquiry form above the photographs is one action rather than a rebuild.
What goes in one
And a strip is drawn from these
A strip is a surface, and these are the parts that can be put on it — the same set on every site we build, written and kept by us.
- TextThe words, and the marks that break them up.
- HeadingTextRich textDividerBreadcrumbsMarquee
- MediaPictures, film, and where to find you.
- ImageGalleryCarouselVideoIconMap
- LayoutThe furniture that holds everything else where you put it.
- BoxLineShapeTableMenuAccordionTabs
- InteractiveThe parts that answer back when somebody arrives at them.
- ButtonRatingCounterCountdown
- DataParts that fill themselves from a list, and the controls a visitor narrows it with.
- CardsRepeaterPaginationSearch boxDropdownChoicesToggleSliderDate picker
- FormsWhat a visitor sends you.
- FormNewsletter
- CommerceWhat a visitor takes to the counter.
- CartCart buttonCheckout
Every one of these is part of the same piece of software, maintained on one schedule, which is why a fault in any of them is ours to fix. Why that matters →
One page, three widths
The narrow one is not a different site
The wide screen is where a site is drawn; the tablet and the phone begin as that drawing scaled down. Press a width to see what moves.
The wide layout is the one that gets drawn. Everything is put where it goes here first, and this is the width it is measured in.
- Placed here
- Moved, resized or hidden at this width, and it stays where it was put.
- Carried across
- Not touched at this width — taken from the wide layout and scaled to fit it.
Change it once
The strip that is on every page is one strip
A strip does not have to belong to the page it was made on. Kept in the site’s library it can be dropped on any page that needs it.
Or cut one loose
A page that needs its own version gets the copy detached, its pictures copied with it, and it stops following. Every other page carries on unchanged.
The same idea, one size up
A whole page can be kept as the starting point for the next one, pictures included. What is made from it is its own from that moment.
Straight answers
The questions this page raises
Including the obvious one, which is why you are reading about strips and parts instead of looking at finished sites.
Not on this page. A site we build belongs to the business that paid for it, and hanging somebody’s shop on our own marketing page as decoration is not a thing to do without asking them first. So what this page shows is the material rather than a wall of pictures. What we will happily do is sit with you at a screen and build part of a page while you watch — you say what you want on it, and you see how long it takes.
No, and the reason is worth a minute. The colours a site uses and the two typefaces it is set in are held in one place, and the parts of a page point at those rather than each carrying its own copy. Change the colours and everything that was following them changes with them, immediately and everywhere, without anybody going through the pages. Different colours, different type, different pictures and a different arrangement of the strips is not one site in two coats of paint — it is two sites.
Yes, and before anything is published at all. A page can be sent to you as a plain link that needs no account and no password — you open it, read it the way a visitor would, and tell us what is wrong with it. Nothing that anybody else can see has moved at that point.
The change is made on the page, and publicly nothing happens. What is being served stays exactly the version that was published, until somebody publishes again — so an edit left half-finished on a Tuesday afternoon is never what a customer arrives at.
No. Any page can be kept as a starting point for the next one, its pictures included, and what gets made from it is its own thing from that moment — working on the new page never reaches back into the one it came from. Whether that is worth doing depends on the site; a page nobody will ever look at twice is not worth keeping, and a page you will want six of is.
Have one walked through with you
Tell us what the site has to do — what you sell, who has to find you, and what has to be easy to change afterwards. We will take you through how it would be built, at a screen, with your own pages rather than a demonstration written to look good.