Your website
In short
Choose + beside Your Apps, pick Website and name it. Sapilon creates a www/ folder, an Astro site that builds to plain HTML pages. Ask the Agent to write the pages, check them in Preview, and publish it from its own Publish page: the website goes live on its own www address, beside your apps, with no sign-in.
A website is the public face of a business: a home page, about, services, pricing, contact and perhaps a few articles. It is a different thing from a web app. A web app is the product people sign in to use. A website is a set of ordinary pages that anyone, and any search engine or AI assistant, can read without signing in.
How is a website different from a web app?
| Web app | Website | |
|---|---|---|
| Who uses it | People who sign in | Anyone |
| Built as | One app that draws its own page | One plain HTML file per page |
| Folder | web/, web-<name>/ |
www/, www-<name>/ |
| Address | web.your-project.sapilon.com |
www.your-project.sapilon.com |
| Pages in Sapilon | Nav Menu, Icons, Web Manifest, Layout, Theme | Overview, Pages, Search & sharing, Publish |
A website is built to load quickly and to be readable by search engines and AI assistants. It has no sign-in and no connection to your project’s database. If a page needs your data, it belongs in a web app.
Adding a website
- Choose + beside Your Apps, and pick Website.
- Give it a name. The first website goes in
www/; a later one goes inwww-<name>/. - Wait a minute or two while Sapilon creates it. When it is ready it appears under Your Apps.
The site starts with one home page that carries your project’s title and colours. Ask the Agent (see your first Ask for how to brief it) to write the rest: describe the business, and it writes the pages, with a title and description for each.
What the Website pages show
Under your website, in the project tree, are four pages.
- Overview: where the website is served and whether it is published, what it is built with, and a warning if it no longer meets what publishing needs.
- Pages: every page of the site. Preview opens one.
- Search & sharing: the site’s name, home page title and description, as search results show them, and the picture a shared link shows. You can also replace the favicon, the small icon in a browser tab.
- Publish: puts the website online, and keeps the history of what you published.
If the site no longer meets what publishing needs, a warning at the top of the Overview lists what is wrong in plain words, with a button that asks the Agent to fix it. Publishing stays off until it is fixed.
Previewing a website
Preview has a picker for the app you are looking at once your project has a website. Pick Website to see it. What you see is the real build of the site, so a page that would fail to publish fails in Preview first. It rebuilds after every Agent turn that changes the website.
Publishing a website
A website publishes on its own, from Website › Publish. It does not wait for your apps, and your apps do not wait for it: a change to a page needs no app release, and you do not need a Live Server to put a website online.
The first publish also sets up the website’s storage and its address,
www.your-project.sapilon.com, which takes a few minutes longer. After that, Publish changes
builds the website and uploads the pages. It asks first, because the website goes in front of the
public, and shows the changes that go out.
The page shows whether the website is published, what is new since, its addresses, and a history of every publish. Open an entry to see its changes, and to Publish again an earlier version. If a publish fails, the page says where, and nothing on the website changes until the build has passed. Repair website sets the address, storage and content delivery up again, then publishes what the website runs now.
After the website is built, Sapilon looks it over: a link that goes nowhere, a page with no title or description, an image with no description for screen readers. These are listed in the history entry as things worth a look. They never stop a publish.
When the Agent changes the website, the end of its answer offers Publish website.
You can put the website on your own address too, as you can with a web app, once it is published. See your own web address.
Why has the website no Theme or Icons page?
Those pages style a web app’s screens, and a website has its own styles. Its look lives in the site’s stylesheet, and the Agent changes it when you ask. Your project’s brand colour is used once, to start the site’s colour scheme, and after that the website’s colours are its own.
Can I change the website without the Agent?
Yes. It is code in your project, in the www/ folder, and you can edit it as you would any other.
Run npm run dev -w www to see it on your own machine. Keep its configuration as it was created:
publishing relies on it.