Documentation · 5 min read
Your site's dashboard
Who got in touch, how many people came and where from, and what you have for sale — the four screens behind every site you build.
What the dashboard is
A website with only a front is a brochure. It looks right, it says the correct things, and it tells you nothing — you find out it is working because the phone rings more than it used to, which is a feeling rather than a fact.
The dashboard is the back of it. Every project you build gets one, it is not an upgrade or a separate product, and it is where the site stops being a picture: leads arrive somewhere you can read them, visits get counted, and the things you sell have prices attached.
It has four screens. Open any site from your list and you land on the first of them, with the other three down the left.
Note. Each site has its own dashboard. Nothing is pooled between them — build one for yourself and one for a friend and the leads, the visitor counts and the catalogue stay apart.
Overview
The first screen is the site itself: whether it is live, the address it answers on, and the way back into editing it.
It is deliberately the smallest of the four. The honest answer to "how is my website doing" is almost never on a summary screen — it is on the two after this one — so this page's job is to get you somewhere else quickly and to hold the one link worth copying.
The live address
This is the link to put on a van, a card, or the end of a phone call. It works for anybody you send it to, with no account and no sign-in.
Tip. Send it to one person who has never seen the site before and watch which page they land on. It is rarely the one you spent longest on, and the Analytics screen will tell you the same thing a week later.
Leads
Any form on a site built here posts to this screen rather than into a void. It solves the specific failure that kills small-business websites: the contact form that goes to an address nobody checks, or to nothing at all, quietly, for a year.
What is recorded
Four things, and none of the four is required. That is deliberate — a form that only asks for a phone number is a perfectly legitimate form for a trade business, and refusing the lead because there is no email address would lose you work to protect a database column.
What a lead holds
- Name
- Whatever they typed, if the form asked
- Optional — not every form asks for one
- Phone
- Optional, and often the only thing filled in
- Message
- The free-text part of the form
- Site
- Which of your sites it came from
Reading them
- Open the site from your list.
- Choose Leads in the left-hand column.
- The most recent lead is at the top.
Note. Nothing here expires. A lead from three months ago is still on this screen.
What it is not
It is not a CRM. It does not chase anybody, it does not send anything on your behalf, and it will not tell you which leads turned into work — that is your judgement and your job.
It is a list of people who asked you to call them back, kept somewhere you can find it.
Analytics
Four things are recorded for a visit. It is worth being precise about them, because most analytics pages are vague on purpose.
What is recorded
What a visit holds
- Page
- Which page of your site was looked at
- Came from
- The referring site as a domain — google.com, facebook.com — or nothing if they typed the address
- Device
- Phone or computer
- Visitor
- A marker, so ten pages in one sitting count as one person rather than ten
The questions it answers
- Is anybody actually coming to the site
- Did the leaflet, the post or the sign do anything
- Is it mostly phones — which decides whether the phone layout is worth an evening
- Which page do people land on first, which is almost never the one you expect
What it deliberately does not do
There is no cross-site tracking, no profile that follows anybody anywhere, and no third-party advertising tag on your website doing something on someone else's behalf.
It answers the questions a small business has. It does not answer the questions an advertising department has, and it is not trying to.
Note. A visit that fails to record is one row of a chart, so nothing about the counting is allowed to delay your page or block it loading. The count is a best effort by design.
Products
If the site sells something, the catalogue lives here with a price against each thing.
How prices are held
In the smallest unit of the currency — pence, cents — rather than as a decimal. That sounds like a technicality and it is the reason a chair priced at 45.99 does not quietly become 45.98 somewhere between the form and the checkout.
Tip. Type the price the way you would write it on a label. The rounding is handled for you, and it rounds rather than truncates, which is the difference between selling something for what you meant and selling it a penny short.
Taking the money
Be careful about this part with any website builder, including this one. Taking payments involves a payment provider, an account in your name, and terms you have agreed to.
What the dashboard does is keep the catalogue and the prices. What it does not do is stand between you and your own money.
Common questions
Do I have to set the dashboard up?
No. It exists as soon as the site does, and the forms on the site are already pointed at it.
Will I get an email when somebody gets in touch?
The lead lands on the Leads screen. The point of it is that it is somewhere findable rather than somewhere it can be lost — check it the way you check anything else that matters.
Does the analytics use cookies to follow people?
It records the page, the referring domain, the device type and a visitor marker so one person reading five pages counts once. There is no advertising tag on your site and nothing following your visitors anywhere else.
What happens to the dashboard if I export the site?
The exported files are the website. The dashboard is a service the hosted version talks to, so an exported copy hosted elsewhere is a plain site.
