Step 1: Your business details

Start with the facts a customer acts on. Your phone number, your address, your hours, your licenses.

We typed in what you gave us when we built the site. This step is you reading it back and filling in the rest.

Five screens. One under Admin, and four under Content. Each of the four holds one entry, and it is already there.

Warning

Leave Add New alone on those four screens. It makes a second entry, and your website then has to guess which one is real. The tour of the admin panel explains why.

The checklist

1. Your name and tagline

Go to Admin, then Settings, then General. See Settings.

• Check Site Title. It is your business name, and it shows at the top of every page, in the footer, and in the browser tab.
• Write a Tagline. One short line about what you do. It sits under your name in the footer, and search engines may show it too.
• Click Save. There is no Publish on this screen. Your website changes the second you save.

Leave Select Favicon alone. Your website does not use it.

If your tagline still starts with the word EXAMPLE, that is ours. Replace it.

Warning

The Remove button under your logo does not remove the logo. The screen looks like it worked, and your visitors keep seeing the old picture.

To swap a logo, use Change Logo and pick the new one. That part works. To take one off, ask us.

2. Contact Methods

This is the list on your Contact page. Open Contact Methods and check every row.

• Read the phone number digit by digit.
• Read the email address letter by letter.
• Check the address is the one you want customers to drive to.
• Reword the Heading and the Intro line. Ours are stock wording.
• Add a row for anything missing.
• Click Publish.

Warning

One wrong digit and the calls stop. Nothing on the page looks wrong, so nobody tells you.

Publish, then call the number from your own phone and let it ring once.

3. Business Profile

This one is mostly for search engines. It is how Google can show your address and your hours. Open Business Profile.

• Check the street, the town, the state and the postal code.
• Fill in a row for each day you are open.
• Leave out the days you are closed.
• Click Publish.

Warning

Times need two digits, a colon, then two more: 08:00. Not 8:00, and not 8am.

A row in the wrong shape is thrown away without a word. That day simply stops counting, and nothing turns red.

Your hours here are not printed on your website. To show them to a visitor, add an Hours row on Contact Methods as well.

4. Credentials

Your license numbers and your insurance. Open Credentials.

• Replace each EXAMPLE license row with a real one.
• Take out any row you do not need. Click the red trash icon on it.
• Check every number against the paper it came from.
• Add a badge for a claim with no number, such as “Bonded”.
• Click Publish.

Warning

This list is a public claim about your business, and a customer may act on it. List only what you hold, with the number you hold.

5. Social Links

The icons in your footer. Open Social Links.

• Open each profile in your browser and copy the whole address from the address bar.
• Paste it into the row for that platform.
• Take out the rows for platforms you do not use.
• Click Publish.

The rows arrive empty. An empty row shows no icon, so nothing looks broken while you work.

Important

There is a second Social Links screen under Admin, then Settings. It does nothing at all. Your profiles go under Content. See Settings.

What done looks like

Click View Site and look at your own website.

• The Contact page shows your real number, email and address.
• The footer shows your name, your tagline and your licenses.
• There is one icon per social profile, and each one opens your account.
• Nothing on either says EXAMPLE.
• Your phone rang when you called it.

Count the footer icons. One missing means that row could not make a working link, and the fix is to paste the whole web address in.

Next: Step 2: Your photos.