What you get with a website

The short answer

A website, on an address you can give people, with a working contact form, a dashboard behind it, and an export button that hands you the actual files.

The rest of this page is the detail behind each of those, including the parts that come with conditions.

What exists when the build finishes

The site

Real pages, on a live address, that anybody can open

A contact form

Posts to your dashboard rather than to nothing

A dashboard

Leads, visitors and a products list — see the dashboard page

The files

Exportable, and they run without Grafter

Your domain

Optional, and it points at the site you built

The address

Every site gets a share address the moment it is built. It is a real URL, it works for anybody you send it to, and there is no account or sign-in on the other end of it.

The share link

This is the one to send to a friend, a client, or your own phone to see how it looks. It is a plain path rather than a hash address, which matters for a boring and important reason: it survives being pasted into a text message, read out over a phone, or written on the back of something.

Your own domain

If you own a domain you can point it at the site. If you do not, the guide on choosing one is worth ten minutes before you buy — the mistakes are cheap to avoid and expensive to undo once it is painted on a van.

Tip. Say the domain out loud to somebody who has never seen it written, then ask them to type it. If they ask a question, pick a different name.

The contact form

A form on a site built here posts to your dashboard. Name, email, phone and message — whichever of them the visitor filled in, since none is required.

This is the single most common thing that is quietly broken on a small-business website. A form that goes nowhere looks exactly like a form that works, from the outside, for as long as nobody tests it.

1. Open your site's public address in a normal browser window.
2. Fill the form in as a customer would and send it.
3. Open the site from your list and choose Leads.
4. Your test lead is at the top.

Note. Worth doing once when the site goes live, and again any time the form is changed. It takes a minute and it is the only way to know.

The files

The export gives you the site itself — the code, not a screenshot and not a proprietary bundle that only opens here.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Most website builders rent you a page. Stop paying and the page goes dark, and there is nothing to take somewhere else because there never was a file — the site only ever existed as rows in somebody's database.

An export is the difference between a site you own and a site you occupy. Even if you never use it, its existence is what stops the monthly bill being a hostage situation.

What moves and what does not

The website moves. The services behind it are services, and an exported copy hosted elsewhere is a plain site.

Exporting: what comes with you

Pages and styling

Yes — the real files

Images and assets

Yes

The dashboard

No — it is a service the hosted version talks to

Existing leads

They stay on the dashboard; the exported site has nowhere to put new ones

Visitor history

No

Note. A site you have exported and hosted yourself is a website. It is not a website with a back room, unless you build one — which is the honest trade and worth knowing before you press the button rather than after.

Changing it later

The site is not finished when the build stops. Describing a change in a sentence is the same motion as describing the site was — move this, simplify that, make this bigger — and a small change costs a fraction of what the first build did, because a turn is charged for what it actually uses.

Tip. Ask for one change at a time when you are being fussy about layout. Three at once works, and it is harder to tell which of the three produced the bit you did not like.

Common questions