1 Benefits of using Smallsite Design
Smallsite Design is designed to help writers express what they feel passionate about.
Normal website design tools allow a huge amount of freedom to layout your pages as you see fit. Now, while that may work for people who have the knowledge of the technologies and design skills, for most, there will be a lot of versions with dubious layouts and clunky functionality, making the whole process rather frustrating. Instead, Smallsite Design uses a lot of fixed layout values, such as vertical spacing between elements, text colours and what elements are allowed where, so that there are few decisions that will result in disharmonies in the layout.
Such restrictions can be made because Smallsite Design is primarily targeted for producing text-based pages, where layouts have had centuries of print layout designing to shake out what does not generally work, so even if your writing could use a lot of improvement, your pages will still look good!
A consequence is that Smallsite Design does not have the huge photographic emphasis of the so-called modern look. However, those designs are very dependent upon a high level of photographic and layout skills if they are to be effective in keeping people engaged on your site. If you want that look, and have the skills for it, there are many other tools available to help you.
Smallsite Design is for writers, and their audiences are mainly those who like to read, rather than just look at pictures. Smallsite Design supports building pages that their readers will readily be at home with. It allows pictures, but in asides, or inline with an introduction, so that they support the page, rather than overtake the rest of the content.
Site focussed, not just pages△
A useful site is not just a bunch of pages, but a coherent and navigable structure of coordinated pages.
Smallsite Design provides the structures and page types for building a site as a coordinated whole, and as these structures and pages types are used, Smallsite Design takes care of making sure they are all easily discoverable.
A lot of website design tools make out that either a home page makes a website, or that it can be built simply by just dragging-and-dropping media and text blocks onto a page, as if that does not require a significant amount of visual design skill. A home page is not a site, and neither is a bunch of separately-designed pages. A site needs a focus and and have all its narratives be supporting that focus.
If you want visitors to keep returning, pages have to be consistent, and not just in their colour schemes, but in how all the information is presented. They have to know that they can fairly quickly get how it all hangs together so they can reliably navigate it, without thinking they are guinea pigs in someone's visual experiment. The main avenue of bulk knowledge transfer is still words, and not simply scattered amongst pictures. It is the opposite, where pictures must support the significant written narrative. Drag-and-drop is not the best for such largely written narratives.
Smallsite Design provides various article types to support structured knowledge, including general articles, like this one, that allow sections and subsections with navigation menus built up as they are added. There are navigation pages, like the home page, that can contain cards with headings, images and text to help visually elevate important parts of the site. There are also procedures, tests, glossaries, policies and contact pages, enough to cover what a modern working site needs.
Related articles can be grouped into categories, and there is a page that lists all the articles in a category, and even a page that lists all the categories. If wanting to target different audiences, there are subsites, like this main one or Support, with their own home page, categories and navigation, so that visitors can focus just on what they are interested in.
Site-building software must focus on building real sites to be used by real people wanting information, and any substantive body of knowledge becomes dozens of pages, if not hundreds. Smallsite Design is built to make and maintain such sites.
Mobile-friendly△
With over half of all web-browsing being done on mobile devices, web sites have to be able to cater for a large range of viewing screen sizes.
For complex layouts, the former is probably the only way to adequately cater for them. Because Smallsite Design is focussed on a simpler layout paradigm, fluid design is easily accomplished, without any special considerations required by the writer.
Google uses their mobile search bot, rather than their desktop one, for searching sites built with Smallsite Design, because they consider the sites compatible with both scenarios, and mobile has overtaken the desktop as the majority-preferred search platform.
While not recommended for general editing, a tablet or smartphone can be used to do some minor edits when needed, though the more powerful, the better.
Some other benefits△
Some other benefits for your visitors and running your site.
- a.Protects visitor privacy by not tracking them.
- b.Is built to security standards that you wish your favourite sites matched.
- c.Is truly multilingual, with 500+ locales and 100+ user interface languages, so you can communicate in your preferred language, rather than the handful that dominate the web.
- d.Counts page reads. The single most important statistic, and without gathering any other information about your visitors.
- e.Provides subsite feeds and site search, with management facilities to reorganise or restructure the site, build banners and check links.
- f.Facilitates engaging others to add or translate pages, without giving them access to anything other than what they need to do that.
- g.Includes the usual elements, like images, lists and tables, but they can be interlinked by labels on the images. There are also diagrams, program code blocks, and sequences, which can replace many videos at much lower bandwidth, enabling them to run on even modest sites.
- h.Includes help links on every page and section to online help documentation and procedures.
Complete△
The product is complete in that it provides all that it promises.
In these days when products are sold incomplete, but with promises of being complete according to their specification sometime in the future, but mostly never, Smallsite Design is, and was always intended to be, complete. That means that there are no future updates planned to finish the product, nor major changes to include functionality purposely left out to draw in update sales. No, the product is complete at launch.
What the product is dealing with is a core presentation paradigm that is centuries old, but it is just focussed on making the process of getting there more predictable and reliable. This is not cutting edge, so the product does not rely upon dubious or unproven experimental technologies that might need a string of updates to finally tame them. The product has been used on real live sites at every stage of its development. These were always focussed upon their own purpose, and not as possible demonstration sites for the product. The product is built upon the sweat of making real sites.
Many changes and facilities were incorporated into the product as a result of the experiences with creating content on these sites, and with their maintenance. Some facilities were influenced by the directions in which websites were moving, but avoiding fads or design elements that did not serve to support the basic paradigm, and especially not if they sabotaged it. The product firmly remains centred on the written narrative, so visual elements are provided in ways that support that.
Many of these will depend upon feedback. Changes tend to breed opportunities for bugs, so making the product functionally complete at launch means that those opportunities are less to begin with, especially since it has been used on real sites for years, and avoiding changes for other than necessity will reduce them more over time.
Unsuitable for△
By making several layout restrictions, there are several scenarios for which Smallsite Design is likely to be unsuitable.
Smallsite Design is intended for presenting public information, adaptable to a wide range of screens sizes. It is not, and was never designed to be, a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all web solution.
- a.Heavily picture-based layouts, as this product's target audience is not expected to have the sophisticated skills to effectively utilise pictures as the primary information conveying paradigm.
- b.Sophisticated layouts, like maths or other specialised markup. These usually require precise positioning, which tends to work against fluid design, and a thorough understanding of their idiosyncrasies.
- c.HTML tinkering. Smallsite Design does not expose the raw web technologies, like HTML, CSS, or JavaScript for user customisation, but is focussed on editing the document structure, and generating the HTML et al on-the-fly.
- d.Graphic design, which either depends upon tinkering with the HTML or using third-party libraries.
- e.Data collection, as Smallsite Design does not use nor provide a general purpose database to store information.
- f.Sale of goods – link to an installed third-party shopping cart, or use a fulfilment provider, like how this product is sold.
- g.Comments – link to an associated Disqus or social media post page.
- h.Multiple users with secure access to their own private information.
Unfortunately, web technologies are not really ready to handle vertically-oriented scripts, like traditional Mongolian. Until all the technical issues with being able to simply flick a switch to change a page's orientation and have everything line up are solved properly, the product will not cater for such scripts because they would require substantial customisation per script until then, especially in the CSS. All the major browsers would have to also be ready to handle them, so it might be a few years before such scripts are properly rendered without problems.
However, Smallsite Design can be used to provide your basic site maintenance needs, while you can install or link to third-party providers to perform specialist needs. Note that for some needs, like shopping carts, you will need substantial professional help to set them up and maintain them, which is why they are not included in Smallsite Design.
Smallsite Design is for those whose customers like to do thorough research into what they are interested in. They are more likely to spend a long time reading all they can, rather than just clicking around pictures out of curiosity. Words, they love them, and words are what Smallsite Design is built for! After all, Words tell the story.