▤Pages and blocks

Every menu item on your website is a page: Home, About us, Contact, Services. You create them in the Pages area and set their order.

Every page has its own address. The legal notice (Impressum) and privacy notice are pages too — they are generated from your company details and are deliberately not in the main menu, but belong in the footer.

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Blocks instead of code. A page is made up of blocks — heading, text, image, gallery, form, header area. You drag them into place one below the other and fill in fields; you do not have to worry about layout.

A proven start for the home page: a header area at the top (large image with a heading), below it a text block that says in two sentences what you do. Everything else follows from that.

With reusable blocks — the Symbols area. There you store content that appears identically on several pages: contact box, opening hours, donation appeal, notice banner.

Change once, up to date everywhere: such a symbol is only embedded on the pages, not copied. If you change the phone number there, it changes everywhere along with it.

Rule of thumb: if the same content appears on three or more pages, turn it into a symbol. For one-offs, it is better to write directly on the page.

It is the part after your address — so “contact” in yourwebsite.com/contact.

Two rules:

• Keep it short and in lower case.
• Avoid changing it later if at all possible, otherwise old links lead nowhere — emails already sent, business cards, directory entries, search engine results.

If it cannot be avoided, plan the redirect before you rename.

With the Preview. Changes remain a draft until you publish — the preview shows the draft as visitors would see it after publishing.

Look at the page on a phone too. Most visitors arrive there, and a header area that looks good on a large screen can fill the entire first screen on a phone without saying anything.

It disappears from the menu and can no longer be reached at its address. Anyone who saved the link ends up nowhere.

If a page is only meant to be gone temporarily, it is better not to publish it or to take it out of the menu rather than deleting it. And if it is to go permanently, consider whether a redirect to a suitable other page makes sense — for the visitors who still have the old link.

Via the order of the pages in the Pages area.

A piece of advice that achieves more than any design: keep the menu short. Five to seven items are good, twelve are too many. Anything rarely needed belongs in the footer or on a subpage — not in the main menu.

Yes — the legal notice and privacy notice are set up exactly like that: their own address, but deliberately not in the main menu.

This is also the way to go for pages you want to link to specifically: a landing page for a campaign, a form for a particular occasion, a thank-you page after submitting.

From top to bottom, in this order:

1. Header area with a sentence that says what you do and for whom — not “A warm welcome”.
2. Four short reasons why someone should call you.
3. Services in a few points, not as a catalogue.
4. Evidence — a reference, a figure, a picture of the work.
5. Contact, visible, with a phone number.

The first point carries half the page. Anyone who does not understand within five seconds what it is about will not read the rest.

Four — more tends to get in the way at the start:

• Home page
• Services (or offer)
• Contact
• Legal notice and privacy notice — mandatory, they belong in the footer, not in the main menu.

Everything else — team, careers, references, blog — comes when there is something to tell. An empty careers page does more harm than good.

By moving them — in the editing view or directly in the live editor, where you drag blocks to the right place and see the effect as you go.

Afterwards, check the preview on a phone: on narrow screens, blocks that were meant to sit side by side are stacked one below the other — there, the order decides what is read first.

For recurring content, the reusable symbol is the right tool — it is embedded, not copied, and changes everywhere along with it.

For a whole page that should have a similar structure, the pragmatic way is: create a new page, choose the same blocks, fill in the fields. That takes a few minutes, because nobody has to worry about the layout.

Short, concrete and from the reader’s point of view.

Three rules that almost always help:

• The main point first. What you do, in one sentence, right at the top.
• Concrete rather than promotional. “We have been in Dresden since 1998 and roof flat roofs” beats “Your competent partner for everything to do with roofs”.
• Short paragraphs. On a phone, a paragraph of eight lines is a wall.

And one sentence that saves a lot: write the way you would say it on the phone.