◇Limits — what Aurora Hive Sites cannot do

No. Aurora Hive Sites shows products and prices, but does not handle sales: no shopping basket, no order, no payment for goods, no shipping.

The reason is not technical but legal and operational: a shop brings with it the right of withdrawal, rules on the order button, payment processing, refunds and tax questions. That is a product of its own, not a block.

What works instead:

• Show products and let people enquire. For goods that need explaining and for trade services, this is the better way anyway.
• Put a real shop alongside and link to it from the website.
• Donations and membership fees — these work, because they are not a sales contract for goods.

Not with a booking calendar of its own. What works: a form through which someone names preferred dates, and you confirm.

For many businesses, that is even the better way, because an automatically assigned appointment often does not fit: travel time, materials, preparation.

If you need real booking — medical practice, hairdresser, consultancy — use a service that specialises in it and link to it with a button. That is more honest than an embedded window, works more reliably on a phone and can be switched.

What to bear in mind when linking: the service processes your customers’ data. It belongs in the privacy notice, and you need a contract with it.

Only in a simple form. There is a members’ area: signed-in people see content that stays hidden from others.

What does not exist: groups, graded rights, personal file storage, invoice overviews per customer, forums.

If you need something like that, it is a portal — a system of its own with its own effort. The usual way is to put it alongside and link to it.

What the simple members’ area does well and what it is intended for: internal club information, minutes, forms for members, a protected download area. For most clubs, that is exactly enough.

No, and that is a deliberate decision, not a gap.

Public comments bring obligations that small businesses underestimate: you are liable for unlawful posts once you know about them, you have to moderate, and you have to deal with spam and insults. Anyone who does not do that every day has a page full of advertising junk after four weeks.

What works instead:

• Feedback via a form — it reaches you, not the page.
• Customer testimonials as an edited section. You decide what appears.
• The discussion where it belongs — on social networks, where moderation tools and user habits already exist.

Within the themes: yes — colours, fonts, image style, spacing. Free in the sense of “any element in any place”: no.

That is the core of the approach. A website builder in which everything can go anywhere produces, after two weeks, a page that falls apart on a phone and that nobody can maintain any more. The restriction is the reason the result works on every device.

If you need something specific that no block provides:

1. Check whether it can be built from existing ones — usually it can.
2. Check whether it is really needed or just a habit from the old site.
3. As a last resort, the HTML section, with all its disadvantages.

Via the HTML section: yes, embedded one to one. But without a safety net — no checking, no support, no guarantee that it will still fit after an update.

What it is useful for: a booking tool, a specialist service, a map service with a special view.

What it is not for: design. Anyone who slips in their own CSS to move something will, after the next change of theme, have a page that breaks in three places — and nobody knows any more why.

What does not exist: access to the page head, custom scripts for the whole website, custom templates in the source code. Anyone who needs that needs a different tool.

What works: several language versions, separate addresses per language, a language switcher, AI-supported pre-translation.

What does not work:

• Automatic translation on the fly. Each version is maintained content, not a filter over the original.
• Different content per country with its own pricing and its own legal texts. That is a different project.
• Languages with a different reading direction in full.

The practical advice remains: a second language doubles the maintenance. Only do it if you need it, and then completely. A half-translated website makes a worse impression than a monolingual one.

The newsletter here is designed for the standard case: one list, one text, one sending run, with proper sign-up and unsubscribe.

What it is not:

• Not a marketing automation tool. No sequences across several emails, no triggers, no branching by behaviour.
• No fine segmentation by purchasing behaviour or interests.
• No mass mailing in very large quantities.

If you need campaigns in stages with automatic follow-ups, Aurora Hive Sales is the right place — that is exactly its subject there, including deliverability and bounce handling.

For most clubs and small businesses, the simple way is the right one: something worth reading to everyone four times a year.

Only what comes in via the website: form entries, newsletter sign-ups, members, donors.

What does not exist: contact history, follow-ups, quotes, phone notes, tasks. That is the job of a CRM.

The separation is intentional: a website that is half a CRM on the side does both badly, and the data then sits in two places without anyone knowing which one is right.

If you need both: the interplay is designed for exactly that. The website collects, the CRM works with it from there.

Via forms, to a limited extent. For the standard case — a photo with an enquiry, a completed form — that is enough.

What you should consider before setting it up:

• What arrives? File uploads are a popular route for malware. Do not open anything you were not expecting.
• Where does it stay? Uploaded files are third-party data. You need a purpose, a deadline and a place.
• Is it really needed? For applications and quotes, an email address is often the better way — there you have your usual protection mechanisms.

For large files and complete application portfolios, a website is not the right way anyway.

By these five signs — one is enough:

1. You sell goods online, with a shopping basket and shipping.
2. You need real booking with availability.
3. You need a portal with groups, rights and personal areas.
4. You have hundreds of editors or multi-stage approval processes with roles per area.
5. Your site is an application, not a website — with calculations, configurators, state logic.

What is not a sign: “We are too big for this.” The size of a business says little about the nature of its website. There are corporations with five pages and one-person businesses with forty.

If in doubt: write down what the website must be able to do. If more than two of the points above come out of that, you are talking about something else.

Some of it, yes; some of it explicitly not — and the difference matters if you want to build on it.

Not planned, because it contradicts the purpose: shop, forum, portal with rights management, freely movable design.

Conceivable, because it fits: more blocks, more themes, improvements to what exists.

What this means for your decision: buy according to what is there today. A promise of a future version is not a basis — with any provider.

If you are missing something, report it. A wish that several people share has good prospects. A special case is more likely to be linked than built in.