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Smallsite Design

Build a site, not just pages

5  What can be messed with?

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Lists of useful things you can change with Smallsite Design.

How useful a content management system is is dependent upon what can be changed, but that has to be balanced with how much technical knowledge is required to do that successfully. For example, building sites with HTML, CSS and JavaScript provides the most flexibility, but also the highest technical competence to produce useful sites. Smallsite design hides those technologies, but offers many options that produce good-looking and functional sites with a lot less knowledge.

Structuresβ–³

A site is a three-level structure, with a variety of article types.

The three levels are:
  1. a.Subsites – with their own home page and navigation tree.
  2. b.Categories – to group related articles.
  3. c.Articles – where the real content is.
The types of articles are:
  1. a.General – can contain sections and subsections.
  2. b.Navigation – like the home page, and can have cards, a catalog or gallery linking to categories and articles.
  3. c.Procedures – for formally documenting processes and procedures, and can form a hierarchy of interlinked procedures.
  4. d.Tests – of up to 20 questions for visitors to gauge their knowledge before or after reading an article.
  5. e.Contact – listing a variety of contact methods.
  6. f.Policies – for privacy and site usage conditions.
  7. g.Glossaries – for listing common terms and abbreviations, and their definitions.
There are also locales for multi-lingual pages, and they can use:
  1. a.One of 17 quote-subquote pairs.
  2. b.One of the other locales as part of a fall-through hierarchy to get text from if the current article does not have text for the current locale.

Files can be imported, and are categorised by their extension, with images categorised by size for inclusion in relevant picklists.

Themesβ–³

The look and feel of pages can be changed per subsite.

The theme parameters that can be changed are:
  1. a.One of 17 hues to specify the basic colours of pages.
  2. b.One of six saturation-luminance combinations, from greyed to dark.
  3. c.One of five accents to offset the colours of headings from the page background.
  4. d.Sans-serif or italicised serif page headlines.
  5. e.One of seven border curvature radii.

Bannersβ–³

The look and feel of banners can be changed per subsite.

The banner parameters that can be changed are:
  1. a.Up to two lines of individually sizable lines of text.
  2. b.Sans-serif or italicised serif banner text in choice of three colours.
  3. c.Choice of a background image or an insert, like an icon.
  4. d.Offset the text horizontally.
  5. e.One of five accents to offset the banner background colour from the page background.
  6. f.Banner padding and insert sizing and offset are configurable.
  7. g.Text and settings from the main-subsite master-locale banner fall-through to the others unless modified.

Other featuresβ–³

There are more things that can be changed.

Other features that can be tweaked are:
  1. a.Articles can be created as templates for use as proforma, or to hold predefined element arrangements to clone from.
  2. b.The default copyright setting is All reserved, but the text can be changed, such as to use Creative Commons, and can have a URL specified for the page where its conditions are listed.
  3. c.Renamed articles and categories automatically have redirects created for them, but redirects can be created for a single page, wildcard group, or even the whole site.
  4. d.Authors can be specified at a site, subsite, or article level.
  5. e.Guest mode for demonstration sites, with guest accounts, one of which can be public, as for the product's demonstration site.
  6. f.Inbuilt search facility, but an external search provider can be specified.
  7. g.By default, any page viewed for more than 30 seconds will send the time, page code and locale to the site, but it can be stopped, and statistics deleted on a per week basis.
  8. h.An archive can be used to overwrite a site, or elements from it can be import to the site.
  9. i.Registration details can be specified for legal reasons, such as business numbers.
  10. j.The page headline and byline are included in browser tabs and search engine listings, but extra text can be added to wrap those in.
  11. k.Passwords are checked against the Have I Been Pwned database, but another provider's URL prefix can be specified.
  12. l.Several MIME types for files to be displayed in the browser are already specified, but future ones can be added as browsers accommodate them.
  13. m.Specific site search robots can be blocked, such as GPTBot.
Links   △Latest articles&β–³
  • β€’Supported languages
  • β€’Sample test
  • β€’Design principles
  • Subsite linksβ–³
  • β€’Versions   Terms and conditions
  • β€’Contact   Policies
  • β€’Categories   Feed   Site map
  • Searchβ–³

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