Training Guide for Last Chance Mercantile

1What the site is (in one paragraph)

The website is a simple "brochure" site — six pages of information about the store, with no logins, no shopping cart, and no database. It is built once into plain web files and served from Replit's hosting. Because it's so simple, there is very little that can break on its own.

The pages: Home, Donating to LCM, plus the other four interior pages listed in the top navigation.

2The one golden rule

Changes are never live until you Republish.

You (or anyone helping you) can edit and preview all day — visitors keep seeing the old version until you press Publish/Republish in Replit. This is a safety feature: nothing goes live by accident.

3Routine tasks

Making a text or photo change

1. Open the project in Replit and describe the change to the Agent in plain English (e.g. "Change the store hours on the home page to 9–4").
2. Look at the preview pane to confirm it looks right.
3. Press Republish.
4. Open lastchancemercantile.org in a private/incognito browser window to confirm the live site updated.

Checking the site is up

• Just visit lastchancemercantile.org and www.lastchancemercantile.org — both should show the site.
• If the live site looks broken but the preview looks fine, the safest move is usually to roll back to a previous checkpoint in Replit and republish (see section 10).

Sharing links (texts, Facebook, etc.)

• When you share a page link, phones and Facebook show a preview card with the page's title and a photo of the storefront with the logo.
• Previews are cached. If you fix something and the old card still appears, it can take hours to refresh on its own. Trick: add ?v=2 (or any new number) to the end of the link to force a fresh card, e.g. https://lastchancemercantile.org/donating-to-lcm?v=2

4How to ask the Agent for a change

The Agent does the work; your job is to be specific about what you want. Most problems come from a request that left something to guess.

A good request has three parts: where, what, and the exact words.

Habits worth keeping:

• Give the exact wording you want. If you write it out, you get it. If you describe it, you get the Agent's version of it.
• Name the page. "On the About page…" saves a round trip.
• Say "don't change anything else." It keeps a small edit small.
• One change at a time. Five changes in one message makes it much harder to tell which one broke something.
• Ask it to check the rest of the site, in these words: "Check whether this information appears anywhere else on the site and update it there too." See section 5 for why this matters.
• Ask for confirmation before you republish: "Run the site's built-in checks and tell me they pass." The project has automatic tests for missing photos and broken pages, and this is how you make it run them.
• If the Agent proposes something bigger than you asked for, say no and ask why it thinks it's needed. Small edits should stay small.

5Information that lives in more than one place

Some details are stored once and appear everywhere. Others are typed out on several pages, and changing one place is not enough.

6Adding a new section to a page

A "section" is one horizontal band of a page — a heading, some text, maybe a photo or a button. The site already has a set of standard looks, so ask for one of these rather than describing a design from scratch:

• a plain white band
• a light grey band
• a dark slate band with white text (used for the "Support LCM" call to action — good for making something stand out)
• two things side by side — text on one side, a photo on the other (stacks automatically on a phone)
• a row of photo cards, two or three across

Tell the Agent all five of these things:

1. Which page, and where on it — "at the bottom of the About page, just above the footer"
2. Which look from the list above
3. The heading, exactly as you want it
4. The words, exactly as you want them
5. A photo and a button, if you want them — including where the button should go

Then check the preview on both a wide window and a narrow one before you republish.

7Adding a whole new page

This is a bigger job than a section, but it's still one request. A new page has to be wired into five different places to work properly, and the Agent handles all of them — you just need to check the result.

Tell the Agent:

1. The page name as it should appear in the top menu — e.g. "Volunteer"
2. Where in the menu it should sit — e.g. "between Find Us and About"
3. The web address you want — e.g. /volunteer (keep it short, all lowercase, dashes instead of spaces)
4. The heading and the words for the page
5. A one-sentence description for Google — this is the grey text under the link in search results. Roughly 25 words.

Then ask, in these words: "Add it to the menu, the sitemap, and the page descriptions, and run the site's built-in checks."

After it's done, check all five of these before republishing:

• The new page appears in the top menu, in the right spot
• Clicking it opens the new page
• The browser tab shows the right title — not "Last Chance Mercantile" alone, and not "Page Not Found"
• The page looks right on a narrow window
• The Agent confirmed the built-in checks passed

8Things to leave alone

These are set up correctly and quietly cause trouble if changed.

• The web addresses of existing pages. Changing /donating-to-lcm to something else breaks every link ever shared and every Google result. If a page truly needs renaming, say so explicitly and ask the Agent to redirect the old address to the new one.
• The domain and DNS settings. They're done. See section 9.
• Photo files that are already on the live site — renaming them breaks anywhere the photo was used. Adding new photos is fine.
• The styling system. If the Agent ever offers to "add Tailwind" or "modernise the styling," say no. The site's styling is hand-written and a change like that would collide with it and break the layout in ways that are tedious to undo.
• The www vs non-www setup, and the site's address structure. Both work today; leave them be.

9Things already set up (don't redo these)

• Domain: Both lastchancemercantile.org and www. are connected and secure (the padlock). DNS lives in GoDaddy; the hosting lives in Replit. Renew the domain in GoDaddy each year.
• Page titles & preview images: Each page has its own title and description baked in for search engines and link previews. These update automatically when the site is rebuilt — no maintenance needed.
• Back-to-top button and mobile navigation — built in.
• Automatic checks: the project tests itself for missing photos, broken page links, and pages that were only half-added. Ask the Agent to run them whenever you've changed more than a few words.

10When something goes wrong

1. Don't panic — the site can always be restored. Replit saves a checkpoint after every change. Rolling back to a checkpoint that worked, then republishing, undoes almost any problem.
2. Describe the problem specifically: which page, what you expected, what you saw, and on what device (phone/computer). A screenshot helps enormously.
3. Verify fixes on the live site, not just the preview. Hosting behaves slightly differently than preview — a lesson learned the hard way. Ask whoever helps you to confirm the fix at the real lastchancemercantile.org address, page by page.

A few specific symptoms

11Where to get help

12The safety-deposit box (backups)

• The export zip file is a complete, standalone copy of the site's code. Any web developer can rebuild and host the site from it, anywhere — it does not depend on Replit. Keep the latest version saved somewhere safe (email it to yourself, or keep it in cloud storage).
• Photo masters: keep your original full-resolution photos archived separately — the site only contains web-sized copies.
• After any big round of changes, ask for a fresh export zip and replace the old one.

For a developer picking this up cold

Unzip, then in the folder run:

npm install
npm run build

The finished site appears in dist/public/ — plain files, hostable on any static web host. See README.md for details.

13The checklist for every change

Tape this to the wall.

1. Ask — name the page, give the exact words, add "don't change anything else."
2. Ask it to check the rest of the site for the same information.
3. Look at the preview — wide window and narrow window.
4. Ask the Agent to run the built-in checks and confirm they passed.
5. Republish.
6. Open the live site in a private window and confirm it — the real address, not the preview.