Website
A small website for a business that has not got one.
Getting the first draft
Describe the business and let it write
Give it the name, then a paragraph in your own words: what you do, who for, where, and anything that makes you different. Say it the way you would say it to somebody in a pub. It comes back with pages and sections already written, which is a much easier thing to correct than a blank screen.
What it will not do
It never invents a fact about you. No phone number, no address, no opening hours, no prices, no years in business, no awards. If you did not tell it, it does not go on the page. That is deliberate, and it is the most important rule in the whole tool: a site full of plausible wrong details is worse than an empty one, because you will not check every line and a customer will ring a number that belongs to somebody else. Add those yourself afterwards, in a How to reach you section.
Making it yours
Pages across the top
Home, prices, about, gallery, whatever you need. They appear in the order you put them and the first one is what people land on, so moving a page to the top changes the front of your site. Any page can be hidden while you work on it.
Sections down the page
Ten kinds, and each one says what it is for when you add it: a banner, some words, what you offer, opening hours, a picture, the questions people keep ringing to ask, something a customer said, how to reach you, buttons, and a form. Add them, move them up and down, fill them in. There is nothing to drag and nothing to line up. The layout is decided for you and it comes out right on a phone whatever you do, which is where nearly everybody will read it.
Have a section reworded
Under each one there is a box for asking it to try again: shorter, less formal, more about the emergency work. It keeps the facts already in the section and adds none. Read it afterwards, because it is your name on the page.
The address, the colour and the lettering
The address is what people type or read off a van, so keep it short and obvious. Pick a colour and whether the writing on top comes out black or white is worked out from it, so a pale colour is as safe as a dark one. Three choices of lettering, one of which is whatever the phone already has and loads fastest.
Putting it out
Check it, then publish
The editor shows the real thing in a phone-shaped frame beside what you are editing, drawn by the same code that serves it to a visitor, and looking at your own site is never counted as a visit. When it reads right, publish. You can take it offline again whenever you like.
The printed code
Publishing gives the site a code you can print, on a sheet measured in inches or as an SVG for whoever does your signage. Put it on a van, a window or the bottom of a menu. If you change the address later the code is repointed for you, but anything already printed carries the old address, so that is a reprint.
Being contacted from it
A form on the page
If you have Intake forms switched on, one of your forms can go straight onto any page as a section. Somebody reading about what you do can ask you for a price without leaving the page, which is the moment most enquiries are quietly lost. Pick which form from a list of your own, and remember to open it: a closed form shows a line saying so rather than a form nobody can send. Without Intake there are still buttons, for ringing you, emailing you or opening directions.