Chapter 5 · about 10 minutes
Your first page, and Publish
Everything in Comet's editor can be worked out by clicking around, with one exception. This chapter teaches the exception first, because it is the thing people get wrong, and it is the difference between a live website and a website only you can see.
The one idea: draft and published are two different things
What you are editing
Every change you make — a word, a picture, a whole new page — is saved instantly into the draft. Nothing is ever lost, and you do not have to press Save.
The draft is visible to you, signed in, and to nobody else. Not visitors, not Google, not the link preview on Facebook or WhatsApp.
What the world sees
Pressing Publish takes a snapshot of the draft and writes it out as the real, public version of your site.
That snapshot is what a visitor's browser downloads, and it is what Google and Facebook read. Until you press Publish, they are all still reading the previous snapshot.
Said the blunt way
If you have not pressed Publish, your change is not on the internet — however perfect it looks on your screen. This is not a delay or a cache; it is Comet doing exactly what you told it. Nine out of ten “my site is not updating” problems are this.
It cuts the other way too, and that is the point: you can rewrite your whole homepage over a fortnight of lunch breaks and nobody sees a half-finished page.
Why Comet works this way. The published snapshot is plain HTML, sitting on your own web host. That is what makes your pages fast, what makes them readable by search engines, and what makes a shared link show a proper title and picture instead of a blank box. A site assembled live in the visitor's browser cannot do those things reliably.
Writing the page
Create the page and give it an address
Press New page. You are asked for two things:
- Title — what it is called, for example About us.
- Address — the last part of the web address, for example
about, givingexample.com/comet/about. Comet suggests one from the title. Keep it short, lower case, with hyphens instead of spaces.
Choose the address once
Changing a page's address later breaks every link anyone has already shared or bookmarked, and loses whatever standing it had in Google. Take five seconds over it now.
Add blocks
A page is a stack of full-width blocks, one under another, like a pile of bricks. You add a block, fill it in, and add the next. There are ten kinds:
| Block | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Text | Words. Headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes. Most of a normal site is this one. |
| Hero | The big opening statement at the top of a page: a headline, a line of text, a button. |
| Image | One picture, with an optional caption. |
| Image and text | A picture beside a paragraph. The classic “who we are” band. |
| Cards | Two to four boxes side by side. Services, team members, opening times. |
| Gallery | Several pictures as a grid, or as a swipeable carousel — the carousel is a setting on this block, not a separate one. |
| Call to action | One sentence and one button. “Book a class”, “Get in touch”. |
| Accordion | Questions that open when clicked. Perfect for FAQs and opening hours. |
| Video | Paste a YouTube or Vimeo address and Comet embeds it properly. |
| Divider | A line or a gap between sections. |
Every block has the same three settings, so once you have learned one block you have learned all ten: background (which of your palette's shades sits behind it), space above and below, and an optional link name so you can point a menu item straight at that part of the page.
There is no colour picker on a block, and that is deliberate
Blocks take their colours from your palette. It is why a Comet site still looks like one site after you have added forty pages, and why changing your brand colour in chapter 4 changes the whole site at once instead of forty pages one at a time.
Check it on a phone
Use the phone preview button. You are looking, not editing: Comet works out the phone layout for you, and there is no separate mobile version to keep in step. If something looks cramped, the fix is usually fewer words or fewer cards, not a setting.
Fill in the page's search and sharing details
Each page has its own small set of fields, separate from the site-wide ones in chapter 4:
- Search title — the blue line in a Google result for this page.
- Search description — the grey sentence underneath it.
- Sharing image — the picture that appears when the page's link is posted on social media or in a chat. Landscape works best.
Leave them blank and Comet falls back to the page title and your site description, which is fine. Filling them in is ten minutes well spent on the two or three pages that matter.
Add the page to your menu
Creating a page does not put it in the navigation — some pages, like a thank-you page, should not be there. Open the menu settings and add it where you want it.
Press Publish
Publish is a site-wide action, not a per-page one: one press pushes everything you have changed since the last time. Comet shows you what is about to go out, then writes the snapshot.
Watch the result of the publish
Publishing writes files to your web host, so it is a job that can fail — a full disk, a folder permission, a host that took too long. Comet tells you if it did. If publishing reports a failure, your site is still showing the old version: fix the cause and publish again. Do not walk away from a failed publish assuming it will sort itself out.
Check — and this is the real one
Open a private or incognito window — one where you are not signed in — and
go to your page's address, for example https://example.com/comet/about. Your
page is there, with your colours and your logo, and the browser tab shows your page title.
This is the only test that counts, because a private window sees your site exactly as a stranger does. If the page is missing or looks like the old version, the fix is almost always to publish again and re-check; if the message on screen is something else, find its exact words in Something went wrong → chapter 5.
From here on
- The rhythm is always the same: edit → look at the preview → Publish → check in a private window.
- Publish whenever you finish a thought. There is no cost to publishing often, and a long-lived draft is a change you will forget to release.
- Share the work, not your login. Add colleagues as editors from the settings screen instead of handing over your recovery code.
- If the site sleeps after a quiet week, the first visit takes a few seconds to wake it. Normal — see chapter 3.
That is the whole product. Five chapters, two codes to keep safe, and one button that makes things real.