Every Design Draws the Pages You Switched On

The designs in the catalog were built over several years by different hands. Each one came with its own idea of which sections a site has and what order they come in, and those ideas were written into the design rather than read from your account. So switching a page off sometimes did nothing, and a page you added sometimes appeared in a place you did not choose.

Over the last few weeks every design has been gone through against one rule: the site draws exactly what Website, then Pages says, and nothing else.

What that means on your site

• A section appears because its page is switched on. Switch the page off and the section goes.
• A page you added is drawn in menu order, where you put it, instead of wherever the design preferred.
• Each page carries your name for it as its heading, and your description under that heading. If you renamed Credits to Filmography, your site says Filmography.
• A container's pages are drawn inside it, each under its own name, instead of floating up as separate tabs.
• A pinned page's heading is your name for it too, sitting at the top of its block inside its host page.
• Nothing is drawn twice. A page that was both in the menu and hard-coded into the design used to print both copies.

Clicking a menu item changes the address

Many of the designs are one long page with the menu scrolling you to a section. On those, clicking a menu item now puts that page's own address in the address bar, so Back and Forward move between sections the way a visitor expects, and a link to one section can be copied out of the bar and sent to somebody.

Why this took a while

There are 82 designs in the picker and every one had to be read and changed on its own. A shared rule in one file would have been quicker and would have flattened the differences that make the catalog worth having. The work is the same rule expressed in each design's own language: the design that shows credits as posters still shows posters, and the one that shows them as a timeline still shows a timeline.

This closes out something we have written about twice before, when forty designs were not reading the account at all and when every design started being checked before it ships.

If your site looks different

Open Website, then Pages, and read down the list. What is there is what your site draws. If a heading reads oddly, rename the page and the heading follows. Your page titles and descriptions are set on the same screen.

Want to see the catalog? Browse the designs.