A website built beside you

The situation

You are launching a new service next month and it needs a page: a headline, what the thing is, who it is for, and a way to be contacted about it. You do not want to learn a site builder, and you do not want to describe what you want and then wait three days to find out it looks nothing like the picture in your head. You want to watch it take shape and end with a real address you can print on a card.

What you need

A conversation with your assistant, and nothing else.

If you want the finished site to live at your own domain rather than at the address Player One generates for it, you also need the domain, and you attach it from your account rather than in the chat. Everything up to that point works without one.

The conversation

You start plainly.

Build me a landing page for the new service.

What comes back is not twenty questions. Player One opens the preview pane beside the chat with something to click: a row of real style thumbnails, three or four layout sketches, a few colour palettes, a checklist of sections (hero, features, pricing, questions, contact) and a couple of boxes for the site name and the line that sits under it.

You pick a style by looking at it rather than by imagining what "modern" means. You choose the long single-column layout, tick hero, features and contact, type the name and a tagline, and press the button. The whole brief lands back in the chat at once and the picker closes.

Player One then builds the real site and opens it running in the pane, wide, with the sidebar tucked away. This is not a mock-up of a page: it is the page, in a browser frame, with the fonts and colours you chose, beside the conversation that made it.

Now you react to what you can see.

The headline is too long. Cut it to five words, and move the contact section up so it is the second thing on the page.

The pane refreshes as the files change, so the new version arrives in front of you rather than in a message telling you it is done. Ask for a warmer background, a photograph on the left, shorter paragraphs under the features. Each change is an edit to the part you named, so the rest of the page stays exactly as you had it.

When it looks right, you ask for an address.

That is it. Put it online.

Player One asks one question before it does anything: is this temporary, or permanent? A temporary address is for looking at and for sending to a colleague for an opinion, and can be given an expiry so it tidies itself away. A permanent one is registered properly: it is kept for good, and it starts itself again if it falls over. You can take a temporary address today and say "make that permanent" once the copy is signed off.

The address you get is one Player One generates. Pointing your own domain at it is done from your account rather than by asking an agent, and Player One will tell you so rather than pretend otherwise. Anyone who has the address can open the site, and the long identifier in it is the only thing keeping strangers out, so pass it on only to people who should see it.

What you end up with

A working site at a permanent address, and the files that make it sitting in a workspace of their own under Manage > Files (/workspaces), where you can read them, download one or take the whole thing as a zip. Nothing is trapped in the conversation.

You also keep the ability to change it. Come back in six weeks with "add a second pricing tier and change the phone number" and Player One starts from the site as it stands rather than from nothing.

Make it yours

A contact form that lands in your chat. Ask for the contact section to be a real form and what someone fills in on the page arrives in your conversation as a message. It is a light touch rather than a customer database: no visitor accounts and no stored list of submissions, but enough to catch enquiries on a small site.

A second page. "Add an about page and link it from the menu" works exactly as the first page did, and you can click through the site in the pane as it grows.

Hand the build on when it gets bigger. Player One may offer to pass a larger site to an agent that builds them for a living, or to open a job so several agents work on it at once while you get on with your day.

If something looks wrong

If the pane looks stale, use Refresh in the floating pill inside it. If the page feels cramped, switch to Wide view in the same pill.

Some addresses refuse to be displayed inside another page. The pane says so plainly and gives you a button to open the site in a new tab instead.

If a permanent site stops answering weeks later, say so in the chat. Your assistant can check what is registered, what is running and what the site has been logging, and put it back up.

Related

Make things covers everything else Player One produces this way, from letters to video. The preview pane explains the surface a site appears in, and Workspaces and files where its files live.