Building a page
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How to get a new page out of a conversation: what to say, what to check before it goes live, and where to start.
Ask for the page
Three things make the difference, and none of them take long to say.
- Which brand. Names repeat across an account. Say it explicitly, every time.
- What the page is for. A landing page for a campaign, an about page, a set of house rules. The job, not the layout.
- Who is reading it. New visitors, existing members, someone arriving from an ad.
Where the page should live is worth saying too, if you care: the address is part of the page, and moving one later is more work than getting it right now.
Say it the way you would say it to a colleague.
The assistant will read the brand first, so the new page matches the ones already there: the same header, the same footer, the same navigation, the same look. A page without them arrives looking broken.
Two ways in
Two ways in, both quicker than describing a layout from scratch.
Point at a page you already like. The assistant reads it and builds the new one to match.
Ask for two looks before it builds. It describes two directions in a few lines each; you pick one, or say what is wrong with both.
With the toolkit, the two looks come from a library of designer-made sections in your own colours and type, and the page opens in a preview pane beside the conversation before anything goes live. Setting up the toolkit →
Look at it first
Ask to see the page before it is saved. Not the code, the page.
Read it properly. This is where you catch a claim you would not make, a tone that is not yours, or a fact you have never heard before.
Publish it
When the wording is right, say so.
Then open the real address in your own browser and look. A confirmation in the conversation is a report that the save was accepted, which is not the same thing as the page looking right to a visitor.
Titles, descriptions and whether the page is allowed into search are settings on the page record, separate from the page itself. Set them after the page is written, not before: writing the page takes those values from the document and will overwrite what you set earlier.
What a brand new page starts with
A page created in a conversation starts empty and out of sight: its navigation and footer are switched off, no menu points at it, and nothing renders until the page is written. Search engines are allowed to index it from the start, so ask for indexing to be turned off if the page is not ready for them.
It does not appear in your navigation on its own. Say so and the assistant switches the page's navigation and footer on and adds the item to the menu, in the position you ask for.
A change is stored first and appears on the live page a moment later, once the page has rebuilt. Rather than refreshing, ask, and the assistant checks:
Facts, and what it must never invent
It can be creative about how your page sounds. It cannot be creative about what is true.
Free to write
- Headlines and section copy
- Tone and voice
- Structure and ordering
- Calls to action
Never invented
- Member numbers or activity figures
- Prices
- Testimonials or named people
- Awards, locations served, claims about what the service does
- Any link or address a tool did not return
It can draw on real things about your brand when it writes: your brand's interests, the demographic breakdown, your polls, and member reviews. Ask for those if you want copy that sounds like your niche rather than like any dating site.
Images
You can hand the assistant an image and ask for it to go on the page. It uploads it and puts it where you asked.
Size and format are chosen when the page asks for the image, not when it is uploaded, so the same uploaded file can be served small on one page and large on another. You do not need to prepare anything: upload the good version and ask for it to be used sensibly.
What this cannot do
| Job | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| Write or change one page, fix copy, set titles and descriptions | Here, in a conversation. This is what the connection is for. |
| Edit the site stylesheet, change something across every page at once, build a set of pages, audit a whole brand | The toolkit, which keeps a copy of the site on your machine, previews every page before it goes live, and pushes changes back in one go. |
Rewriting the body of a page built from a template, such as /about-us or a home page on an older brand | The portal. The platform assembles these pages from content it holds, so there is no page source to read or rewrite. Ask anyway and the assistant tells you which template the page uses and links straight to where its content is edited. Titles, descriptions and indexing can still be set from a conversation. |
Not sure which kind a page is? Ask, and the assistant will tell you before it tries anything.