Web is the public half of your organisation. The pages, the articles, the legal documents, the reviews and the visitors who start a conversation.
Everything else in NearSync is what your team sees. This is what everybody else sees.
What is here
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| CMS | Your blog and articles |
| Knowledge Base | Public help content for your customers |
| Site Structure | Pages and how they fit together |
| Legal Manager | Terms, privacy, and anything versioned |
| Reputation | Reviews people have left |
| Inbox | Visitors who started a conversation |
| Boards | Web work, on a board |
| Reports | How all of it is doing |
Site Structure and Legal Manager do not appear in the Web sidebar. They are real surfaces with real routes, reached from the pages that use them rather than from the menu, which is worth knowing before you conclude they do not exist.
The property that matters
A visitor is not a stranger for long.
Somebody reads an article, starts a chat, leaves a review or books a call, and from that moment they are a record like any other. The conversation lands in an inbox your team already works. The booking lands on a calendar. Nothing has to be copied anywhere.
That is the difference between a website bolted onto a business system and a website inside one. Most organisations run a site on one platform, a help centre on another, reviews on a third, and a chat widget on a fourth, then spend real effort trying to work out whether the person who left a review is the same person who emailed last week.
Where the boundaries are
Three things that live somewhere else, and each catches people out.
The chat widget is configured in Operations, not here. Where it appears, its hours and its greeting are setup. Answering it is Web's Inbox, and the conversation itself behaves exactly like everything else in the department inbox, because it is the same surface scoped to Web.
Your own domain is connected in Operations. See Connecting your own domain.
Marketing campaigns are Marketing. Web is what your site says all the time. A campaign is what you say for six weeks. See Campaigns.
Boards
Web work sits on a board like work in every other HQ: articles to write, pages to fix, documents to review. Same board mechanics as everywhere else, so nothing about it is Web-specific.
Who owns this
Usually nobody, which is the honest problem with a public surface.
Give the blog one owner. A blog with three occasional authors publishes twice and stops.
Give legal documents to whoever signs them off. Not to whoever can edit them. Those are different people and confusing them is how a privacy policy gets changed without anybody reviewing it.
Give the inbox to a real queue. A visitor waiting on a chat nobody watches is worse than no chat at all.
What to do first
Publish the legal documents. Terms and privacy are the two pages every visitor eventually looks for and the two that are most often placeholder text. They are also the fastest thing here to finish. See Legal documents.
Then the knowledge base, if you support customers at all. Every article is one support conversation that does not happen. See The public knowledge base.
Then the blog, if you have something to say. See Your blog.
Reviews and reports come later, because both need traffic to be about anything.
What a visitor actually needs from your site
Three things, in this order, and most sites bury all three.
What you do, in a sentence they can repeat to a colleague.
Whether it applies to them, which is what customer examples and specifics are for.
How to start, as one obvious action rather than four competing ones.
Everything else on a website is supporting material. A site that gets those three right with six pages beats one that gets them wrong with sixty.
What this is not
It is not a website builder. Site Structure manages the pages your site has and the content in them. It does not design them.
It is not a marketing suite. Audiences, campaigns and channel analytics are Marketing.
It is not analytics. It reports on your content, not on your visitors. Traffic and behaviour come from whatever analytics tool your site runs.
What a good Web setup looks like
Not a large one.
Legal documents published and current. Two pages, done properly, reviewed on a date.
A knowledge base that covers your five most common questions. Not a hundred articles. Five that end the conversations you actually have.
A site whose pages are all finished. No placeholders, no eighteen-month-old campaign page still live.
A chat widget only if somebody answers it, during hours somebody is actually there.
A blog only if somebody owns it.
That is achievable in a fortnight and it outperforms most organisations' websites, because most organisations have the opposite: forty pages, half finished, a blog that stopped in March, and a privacy policy that still says the template company's name.
The one thing that costs most to get wrong
Paths, and they are set in Site Structure.
A path is quoted in emails, saved in bookmarks, printed on things, indexed by search engines and occasionally written into contracts. Changing one breaks every reference you know about and every reference you do not.
Everything else here is editable at any time with no consequence. Paths are the exception, and they are usually decided in the first hour by whoever happened to be creating the page.
Reading order
If you are setting up, legal documents, then the knowledge base, then site structure.
If you are running it day to day, the blog and the inbox are where the work is.
If you are reporting on it, Web reports, and read what it does not cover before you present it.
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