Watching it work

Your site sits beside the chat while you work, and it is the real thing — not a mock-up, not a picture. When you ask for a change, you watch it arrive.

The preview

It fills in as the work lands, so you can see the shape of a page before the words are finished.

Above it you can switch what size screen you are looking at: Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, or Fluid, which just fills the space it has. Switching to Mobile is the fastest way to check the thing most of your visitors will actually see.

The preview is also where you point at things: move over any part of your site and a small pencil appears, which opens a box asking what should change about it. See Pointing at something.

While a change is running

Small requests take seconds. A whole new page takes minutes. A first build takes a few minutes.

You can watch, or not. Stop ends the current change where it is — it does not undo what has already been made, and you can ask again straight away.

Leaving while it works

You are not required to sit there. Close the tab, lock your phone, go and do something else: the work carries on without you, and when you come back the conversation and the finished result are both waiting.

If you would rather be told, use "Email me when it's done" and Spanli sends you a message the moment the work finishes. Useful for a big rebuild you kicked off before dinner.

When something finishes while you are on another page of your project, the Chat link in the sidebar shows a small mark so you know to look.

Asking for more careful work

Beside the chat box there is a Build style:

• Faster — quick. What everyone on the free plan gets.
• Standard — the builder thinks each step through. Available on paid plans.
• Higher quality — slower and more thorough, for jobs worth it. Available on paid plans.

More thorough work costs more credits, because it is more work. See Plans and credits.

What is being checked as it works

Every build ends with Spanli looking at the actual pages — at laptop width and at phone width — and checking them: anything running off the edge of a phone screen, buttons too small for a thumb, text too pale to read, links that lead nowhere, pictures with no description for someone using a screen reader.

Serious problems on your home page have to be fixed before the build is allowed to finish. That is enforced rather than left to good intentions, which is why "it looked fine on my laptop" is rarely how you find out about a broken phone layout here.

If something resists a few rounds of fixing, the build ends anyway and tells you plainly what is still off. It does not grind away quietly.