From one email to a live page: what happens in between
You know the change you want: new opening hours, a better photo, a price that has gone up. The hard part has always been getting it made: finding someone, waiting for a quote, waiting for the work, then checking it yourself. With Stevie, your AI web developer, you describe the change in an email, in your own words, and see it on your page before anything goes live. Writing the email is the easy part. What makes it safe to hand over is everything that happens after you press send, so here is the whole journey, from the message you send to the page going live.
You ask in your own words
Email your site’s Stillsite address from your own address and say what you want, the way you would to a person: “On the Contact us page, change our Saturday hours to 8am to 4pm.” One email can ask for several things. Attach a photo straight from your phone, a PDF to download, or a screenshot of something that looks wrong. A large photo is made the right size for the web, and where and on what it was taken is removed before it goes anywhere near your site.
You hear back straight away that your request has arrived, and you always hear back after that: with the change, with questions, with an answer, or with a note that something went wrong, which also comes to us. A request never disappears into silence.
Only the right people can ask
Only the people you have set up can send a request, each from their own address, and an email from anyone else is not acted on. Each person has a level of access. Someone who looks after your pages can change the words, pictures, news and documents. Someone with design access can also change the menu, the colours and how the pages are laid out. Ask for more than your level allows and Stevie makes the part you can have and tells you what he left.
Stevie reads your site first
Stevie reads your website before he changes it, so you never need to say what it says now, and he never makes up a fact. If a price, a date or a name is missing, he asks, and the change waits for your answer. When only part of a request is clear, he makes the clear part, shows it to you and asks about the rest in the same email. Where something is a judgement, such as exactly where a line sits, he makes a sensible call and tells you what he took you to mean. Nothing is taken off a page on a guess.
Every change is checked
Before you see a change, it has been checked, and the checks do not depend on Stevie behaving: they are separate, automatic and strict.
- Every link, picture and form is checked, with accessibility and search basics, on every change.
- A picture or a document has to be what it says it is. A file renamed to look like one is refused.
- A change can only touch what the person asking is allowed to change. Stevie works in words, pictures and documents, never code, so an email cannot add anything that runs on your pages, and your forms, your address and your settings are out of reach of a request.
- Anything that removes something, links to a site you have not linked to before or changes the structure of the site is flagged to the person approving, in plain words, before they decide.
- For a regulated firm, the compliance pack locks the regulated wording, so no change can remove it, and any change to it waits for one named person to say yes.
You see it before it goes live
The approval email shows what changed as pictures: the part of the page as it is now and, below it, how it will be, with the change outlined. A new page or document is listed with its address, and a link opens a preview of your whole site, so you can look at it on your own phone and laptop. The Review and approve button opens the page with the exact words, before and after, and where every link now goes.
One button publishes it, and only that button: replying “approved” or “thanks” changes nothing. The link works once, for seven days, and it is cancelled the moment the change is updated, so an old email can never publish a newer version. Press it and the change is live within minutes, with every version kept.
A conversation, not a form
Reply to any email and your reply is read together with the request it answers. Ask for the change to be done differently and you get a new preview that builds on the one you saw, with the old one cancelled, so there is only ever one version to approve. Ask a question, such as what a page says about prices, and the answer comes by email with nothing on your site changing. Tell Stevie how you like to work, such as “always sign off news posts with our team’s name”, and he remembers it for your site.
Send several requests and none is lost. Each is acknowledged with its place in the queue, and if two of them change the same part of a page, Stevie makes the second one again on the site as it is by then, so nothing needs sorting out by hand.
Changing your mind
Until you press the button you can cancel a change, from the approval page, from your dashboard or by emailing Stevie, and nothing on your website changes. After it is live, every version is kept, so a change can be undone: ask, and it is put back. After each change Stevie asks how it was, Good or Bad, and a cancelled change is asked why, which is how he gets better at your kind of change.
You ask for whatever you like, in your own words, and nothing happens to your website that a named person has not seen and said yes to. How each step works is in the help centre. If you would like it on your own site, send us the address and we will tell you what the move involves.