Your website
The website Grout builds and hosts for you — its pages, its designs, and the editor you shape them in.
Grout gives your company a website and hosts it. It is at
yourcompany.getgrout.com, it is live the moment you build it, and you edit it
in Grout — there is nothing to install, no plugin to keep up to date, and no
second password to remember. Find it at Admin → Website, under Grow,
which opens the editor on your home page. Everything about your website is done
from there.
If you already have a website of your own, you do not have to use this one. Booking forms puts Grout booking on the site you have.
Start from a design
A company with no pages yet sees the designs it can start from:
| Design | What it builds |
|---|---|
| Full site | Home, Services, About, Areas, Book, Contact. |
| Essentials | Home, Services, Book — what you do, and how to book. |
| One page | Everything on one page, to send people to. |
Pick one and the pages are built, ready to edit. Nothing about them is fixed: every word is yours to change. Later, the same designs are behind Start from a design at the foot of the Pages panel.
A design never takes away a page you have made your own. Choose a second design later and any page you have saved yourself is kept exactly as it is; the new design's version of it arrives hidden, under its own address and named after the design, for you to look at and decide about. A page you have never edited is simply replaced.
The editor
Your page fills the screen, exactly as a visitor sees it, with one panel on the right. Click a section on the page and its words appear in that panel; change them and the page changes with you.
To add a section, click the gap it belongs in. Between every two sections — and above the first, and below the last — there is an Add section button. It opens a gallery that shows every section as a picture of itself, so you can tell them apart before you use one. They are grouped in the order a page is built:
| Group | Sections |
|---|---|
| Top and bottom | Your logo and navigation, the foot of the page. |
| Open the page | A top banner, why they can trust you, your credentials, your next opening, an offer. |
| Show the work | Photos of your work, before and after, text beside a photo, who cleans, a video. |
| Prove it | Your services, your price list, what a clean includes, your reviews, what customers say, why people choose you, how busy you are. |
| Ask for the booking | Check your area, a price estimate, your booking form, ask for a callback, a book-now band. |
| Tell them the rest | How it works, questions people ask, where you clean, how to reach you, a block of text. |
Pick one and it drops into that gap, selected, with its words ready to change on the right.
Four sections say things only Grout can know, because they read your own records rather than anything you type into them:
- Your reviews shows the reviews you have published in Reviews, with your replies and your average — never a rating anybody typed.
- Your next opening names the first time you could really come, from your crews' hours, time off and jobs. Nothing free in the next fortnight and the band leaves the page by itself.
- Check your area answers a visitor's zip code against the areas your crews cover, and tells them the first opening there.
- A price estimate prices the home a visitor describes with your own price list — the figure the booking form will quote them, not an estimate someone revises later.
Your header and footer are sections as well. The bar at the top — your logo or your name, the page links, your phone number and the Book button — is a section on the page like any other, so you can change what it shows, make it stay at the top as the page scrolls, or leave it off a page that should offer one way out and nothing else. The foot of the page works the same way, with a line for your small print.
Every page a design builds has both, and so did every page you already had. If you remove a header, that page has no navigation until you put one back — which is sometimes exactly what you want, and worth knowing either way.
What neither of them lets you type is your business name, logo, phone number, email or areas. Those come from your own details, so your website can never say one thing while your booking form and your emails say another.
Photographs are yours to upload. Any section with a photo in it takes a PNG, JPEG or WebP up to 4 MB from your own computer, and none of them shows a stand-in: a section with no photographs in it yet is simply not on your website until you add one.
With nothing selected, the panel on the right lists what is on the page in order — click a row to select that section — and offers Add section for the foot of the page. With a section selected, the row above its words moves it up or down, duplicates it, or removes it (the ×). Removing asks nothing: undo, or Discard, brings it back. You can also drag a section on the page to move it.
Along the top: Dashboard, which leaves the editor, the name of the page you are on (click it to open Pages), and three buttons that show the page at a phone's, a tablet's or a laptop's width. At the right-hand end: View live page, Site settings, undo and redo, Discard and Save.
Three things are worth knowing:
- The preview is your site, not a sample of one. Your colour, your name, your phone number, and your real services with their real starting prices.
- Nothing reaches your website until you press Save. While you have unsaved changes the top bar says Unsaved changes and Save lights up; Discard puts back the page as last saved, after asking. The editor asks before you leave with unsaved changes — including when you close the tab.
- The editor needs a laptop. On a phone it shows you the way to the live site and back to Grout instead.
Pages
Click the page's name at the top to open Pages: every page with its address, how much is on it, and Hidden on any visitors cannot see. The page you are on is ticked. Click another page to open it in the editor. The More control at the end of its row holds the rest:
- View live page opens it as a visitor sees it.
- Hide from visitors takes it off your website and out of the menu while you work on it; Show to visitors puts the last saved version back.
- Delete page removes it, confirmed by name and address.
Add page at the top asks for a name and an address — type Pricing and
/pricing — and drops you straight into the editor. A new page starts hidden
and joins your website's menu the first time you save it.
Your home page cannot be hidden or deleted: a website with no front page has no address that works. To take the whole website down, switch it off in Site settings.
Your services, without typing them twice
The Services section reads your catalogue from Admin → Services. Change a price there and your website says the new price — there is no second copy to keep in step. By default it shows every bookable service, including ones you add later; you can also name the few you want shown, in the order you want them.
Site settings
Site settings opens a panel in four groups. Visibility is the two switches that make your website live and let search engines list it; each saves the moment you flip it. Website is what every page reads: your tagline, the areas you serve, your brand colour (pick it, or type a hex code), and which booking form your Book buttons open. Business is your name, phone and email — your company's own details, the same ones your booking form and your emails use, so changing them here changes them everywhere. Save is at the top of the panel, and saving keeps you on the page you were editing, with your unsaved changes.
Use your own domain
The last part of Site settings is Your domain. Type the domain your
business owns — sparkleclean.com — and choose Connect domain. Your website
will answer at www.sparkleclean.com, and sparkleclean.com forwards there.
A subdomain such as book.sparkleclean.com works too, on its own.
Grout then shows the records to add where you bought the domain: an A
record for @ and a CNAME for www (or for your subdomain), and sometimes
a TXT record when we need proof the domain is yours. Copy each value
exactly. The status moves from Waiting for your DNS records to Setting up
the secure connection to Live on its own; Check now looks again
straight away. DNS changes can take a few hours. If the records still aren't
there after 14 days, the domain is given up on — remove it and add it again
once they are.
Once it is live, your domain carries your website and the pages your customers
open from Grout's emails and texts: tracking, quotes, invoices and card links.
/book on your domain is your website's own Book page. Customers still sign in
to their account at Grout's address, and your website's old Grout address
forwards to your domain. Because those pages live on your domain, a website
page can't use addresses like /track, /quote or /account.
Remove domain puts your website back on its Grout address. Links already sent with the domain stop working until you add it again.
Forms on your own site
Your booking form is a section — click Add section where it belongs and pick Booking form; Site settings chooses which form it shows. There is nothing to paste and no code to copy.
Your lead forms — a hello bar, a pop-up, a slide-in — run on your website automatically as soon as they are live. The list of "sites allowed to run it" in a lead form's Put it on your website card is for other people's websites; your own Grout site never needs to be on it.
What visitors get
The same website, whoever they are. Your site is always light, whatever a visitor has their phone or laptop set to — your colours are your decision, not theirs.
Plain, fast HTML. The editor runs in Grout, not on your website, so a visitor
downloads none of it. Each site serves its own sitemap.xml and robots.txt
for search engines, and a page you have hidden answers "not found" rather than
showing a half-finished draft.