Matt Lawer CRE, Blog Site

Site in Lee & Associates brand colors (red #98002E, charcoal #303C42, navy #003146, official 145° red gradient), built with Eleventy. Netlify runs the build automatically; you never run any code.

Adding a blog post (no code, ever)

This repo is wired for Pages CMS (pagescms.org), a free editor that gives you a clean writing screen in your browser.

One-time setup, after the site is on GitHub:

1. Go to https://app.pagescms.org and sign in with your GitHub account
2. Authorize it for the matt-lawer-cre-blog repository
3. Open the repo in Pages CMS. You'll see "Blog Posts" in the sidebar.

From then on, publishing a post is:

1. app.pagescms.org > Blog Posts > Add Entry
2. Fill in the fields (title, date, category, teaser, FAQ) and write the post in the editor
3. Click Save

That's it. The save commits to GitHub, Netlify rebuilds, and the post is live in about a minute, on the blog page, the home page cards, the sitemap, with Article and FAQ schema generated automatically. You can also upload images through the same interface.

Backup option if Pages CMS is ever down: add a .md file to the posts folder directly on GitHub, using any existing post as the template.

Lead inquiries, straight to your inbox

The contact form uses Netlify Forms. One 30-second setting routes every submission to your email:

1. Netlify > your site > Forms (enable form detection if prompted)
2. Notifications (under Forms settings) > Add notification > Email notification
3. Event: New form submission. Email: mlawer@lee-associates.com. Save.

Every inquiry then arrives as an email with the person's name, email, company, need, and message in the body, and the reply-to is set to the sender, so you just hit reply. The Netlify dashboard keeps a backup archive and filters spam (there's also a hidden honeypot field). Free plan includes 100 submissions per month.

Structure

• posts/*.md: blog posts (managed by Pages CMS; the only content you touch)
• .pages.yml: the Pages CMS editor configuration
• index.njk, blog.njk, thanks.njk: pages
• _includes/base.njk: nav, lead form, footer (edit once, changes everywhere)
• _includes/post.njk: post layout with Article and FAQ schema
• _data/site.json: contact info and site URL used across the whole site
• styles.css: all design, brand palette defined at the top
• robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, favicon.svg: crawler and browser polish

If the site name or domain ever changes

Update url in _data/site.json, plus the URLs in robots.txt and llms.txt. Everything else derives automatically.