Blog

Why editing on the page beats a dashboard

A dashboard is a second website you have to learn in order to change the first one. Here is what goes away when you take it out.

Every website builder promises that you will be able to update your own site. Most of them then hand you a dashboard: a separate screen with its own menus and its own names for things. It even has a preview button, which admits that what you are editing is not the thing your customers see.

The cost of the second website

A dashboard is a second website. It has to be learned, and everything that has to be learned gets put off. The price that changed on Monday is still wrong on Friday — not because the change is hard, but because opening the dashboard is a task. Tasks wait for a quiet afternoon that does not come.

What editing on the page removes

When the editor is the live page, the line you want to change is the line you click. There is nothing to find. A section that should be lower down is dragged lower down. A new page is added from the menu, where pages live. The preview button goes, because there is nothing to preview: you are looking at it.

This is not a trick of the interface. It works because the page is kept as separate pieces — this heading, that paragraph, that picture — rather than as one long run of website code. So a click on a heading is a click on a heading: the styling stays where it is, and the words change.

The test

Hand the editor to the person who answers the phone. If they can fix the opening hours before the call ends, the site will stay true. If they have to write it down for someone else, it will not.