Pages and content

Editing your own site

You can change the words and pictures on your site yourself. Open the page, edit it where you can see it, and the change is queued for approval rather than published to the world mid-sentence.

You can add and remove sections, swap images, edit links, and set what each page says to search engines. What you cannot do is break the design — the editor only offers changes the site was built to accept.

Content that has a shape

Not every section is loose text. A pricing table, a set of testimonials, a list of common questions, a team page, a gallery, opening prices, the areas you cover, the roles you are hiring for — each of these is edited as rows with named boxes to fill in, rather than as free text you have to format correctly yourself. Add a plan, tick the one to highlight, write its features one per line, and the section lays itself out.

These shapes are defined once for every site we run rather than separately for yours, so a testimonial means the same thing everywhere. The practical effect is that when a new kind of section is added, it becomes available to your site without your site being rebuilt — and an existing one can gain a new field without anything you have already written being disturbed.

If someone else changes the site while you have it open

You can leave the editor open as long as you like. It checks every few seconds whether anything has changed underneath it.

If nothing of yours is unsaved, it simply loads the newer version and tells you it has done so. There is nothing to decide.

If you are part-way through an edit, it will not throw your words away. A bar appears across the top saying the site has been updated, your unsaved changes stay exactly where they are, and you choose when to reload.

And if you try to save an edit built on an older version of a page, the save is refused rather than quietly overwriting whoever got there first. You are told what happened, your text is still on the screen, and you can copy anything you want to keep before reloading.

If you close the window part-way through

Unsaved work is kept in your own browser, so reloading no longer costs you anything. Come back to the page and your words are put back, with a green bar across the top telling you they have been restored and that nothing is live until you press Save. There is a button to throw them away if you would rather start from the current page.

If someone else changed that same page while you were away, the bar says so, and saving over their work is refused. Copy anything you want to keep, then start again from the current version.

Where content comes from

Content can also arrive from elsewhere — an article written and illustrated for you lands as a draft on your real page design, so you see the actual page rather than an approximation of it.

It is never published automatically. A person reads it and presses publish.