The Difference Between Pages and Patterns

Most brand websites get built like houses, right? You hire the architect, you pour the foundation, you frame the rooms. And when it's done, it's done. You want to add a sunroom two years later? You're calling the contractor back. Probably ripping something open. Definitely spending money you didn't budget for. The house is beautiful, but it wasn't designed to change—it was designed to be finished.

That's how most websites work, and honestly, it's how most agencies build them. A homepage, some product pages, a few campaign landing pages, maybe a story template. The site launches, everyone's happy, and then a month later someone on the marketing team has an idea for a page that doesn't fit any of the existing templates. Suddenly the whole team is waiting on a developer to build something new. The website that felt so flexible on launch day turns out to be a set of rooms with walls that don't move.

The industry knows this is a problem. The common answer is a generic page builder—something like Divi or Elementor or whatever drag-and-drop plugin your agency prefers. And on the surface it looks like the fix: editors get a canvas, they can drag blocks around, they can build new pages without calling a developer. Freedom. Except that freedom comes with its own cost, and it's a steep one. Generic page builders don't know anything about your brand. They give you boxes and columns and spacing sliders, not your color palette, not your visual language, not the cultural patterns that make your brand feel like your brand. So what happens in practice is that editors either build pages that look nothing like the rest of the site—because the tool let them—or they're so afraid of breaking the design that they don't touch the builder at all. You traded one kind of rigidity for a different kind of chaos. Neither one is actually serving the brand.

Here's what makes this harder for brands like Siete Foods: their identity isn't just visual polish. It's cultural. The God's Eye framing, the Serape patterns, the Flores borders, the Papel Cortado cutouts—these aren't decorative choices. They're how Siete connects to their heritage and tells stories their community recognizes. These elements carry meaning. So when you're building them a website, you're not just building a marketing tool. You're building a system for cultural storytelling. And if that system is rigid—if those cultural elements are locked inside pre-designed templates—the brand can't breathe. Every new story has to fit the old molds. Seasonal campaigns, community programs, product launches, cultural moments—all of it gets squeezed into whatever shapes you made at launch. The brand becomes smaller than it actually is.

We didn't want that for Siete. Their website couldn't be a finished house, but it couldn't be an empty canvas either. It had to be a kit of parts—parts that were already shaped by Siete's identity, so that anything an editor built would look and feel like Siete without anyone policing the output.

Here's the thing most people don't realize about website content: it's not as unique as it feels. When you look at any well-designed brand site—really study it, page by page—you start seeing the same shapes over and over. There's a section with a big image and a heading and some body copy. There's a section with three columns of smaller items. There's a full-width carousel. There's a text block with a colored background and a decorative border. The words change, the images change, the colors change, but the underlying structures repeat. And they repeat because good design is built on rhythm and repetition. Those repeating structures aren't accidents or limitations. They're the raw material for a system.

Once you see content that way—as a set of composable patterns rather than a collection of unique pages—the whole approach to building a website shifts. You stop designing pages and start designing section types. You stop asking "what does this page look like?" and start asking "what are the building blocks, and how do they snap together?" For the Siete site, we identified over twenty distinct section types—features, two-column layouts, accordions, image grids, carousels, rich text blocks, and more—and built each one as a self-contained unit that an editor could drop onto any page in any order. But here's the critical part: we didn't just build neutral content blocks. We built blocks that already knew Siete's visual and cultural language. Every section type understands the brand palette, the cultural patterns, the framing styles. So when an editor composes a page, they're not starting from scratch—they're composing with elements that already speak Siete's language.

Every section in the CMS has two tabs: Content and Layout. It sounds like an organizational detail. It's the load-bearing decision of the entire system.

The Content tab is where the editorial work happens—headings, body copy, images, video, the stuff that changes from section to section. For something like a Feature section, you can optionally link to an existing recipe, event, or collection that already lives in the CMS, and the section automatically pulls in the title, the image, the description. No retyping, no re-uploading. You're pointing at content that already exists and saying "use this here." The Content tab is purely about what a section says and shows.

The Layout tab is where the brand identity lives, and it's the half that most CMS setups completely ignore. Every section has a background color pulled from Siete's brand palette—which means an editor can shift the emotional tone of a page by changing colors, but they can't accidentally pick something that feels off-brand. The system protects the identity while giving them room to compose. Every section has transition controls—the decorative edges that separate one section from the next. And these aren't generic dividers. They're Serape patterns, Flores borders, Papel Cortado cutouts, Diamond geometries—all drawn directly from Siete's cultural and visual heritage. An editor picks a transition style the way you'd pick a frame for a painting. The content inside doesn't change, but the feeling of the page shifts completely. The brand vocabulary is right there in the interface, available for every new story they want to tell.

And then there's the God's Eye. The God's Eye is one of Siete's most recognizable brand elements—a bordered framing treatment with decorative corners, optional flourish icons, and accent colors that reference the surrounding sections. It's not just decoration. It's a cultural symbol that signals "this moment matters." In our system, "God's Eye" is just another layout option. Any section that supports it can be wrapped in that framing with a single dropdown selection. You take the same Feature section, the same content, the same recipe link—switch the layout to God's Eye, choose a corner flourish, pick an accent color—and it transforms from a standard content block into something that feels like a branded moment. That's not a redesign. The editor didn't call anyone. They just composed with the cultural vocabulary they already had.

One detail that matters more than people expect: what happens where one section ends and the next begins. On most websites, sections just stack—a hard edge, maybe a background color change, sometimes an awkward gap. We spent real time on the transitions because they're a huge part of what makes a composed page feel designed rather than assembled. The system automatically calculates the background color of the section above and below, so when an editor places a terracotta section next to a cream one with a Serape transition, the pattern bleeds from one color into the other naturally. Editors don't think about that math. They just pick colors and transitions that feel right for the story they're telling, and the borders do the right thing. The technical system is handling the physics so the editor can focus on the narrative.

This is the kind of detail that's invisible when it works and painfully obvious when it doesn't. And it's the kind of thing that would be impossible to maintain if every page were a one-off design. Because transitions are part of the system, they're always correct, even on pages we never imagined when we built the site. The brand stays coherent not because someone is checking every page, but because the system itself knows what coherence looks like.

Siete's team can log into the CMS and build a page that didn't exist an hour ago. They drag in a Feature section, link it to a recipe collection, pick a God's Eye layout with Flores transitions on a terracotta background, and they're looking at a production-ready section that looks like a designer spent an afternoon on it. They stack a TwoColumn below it, add campaign copy and a product shot, choose a different transition, and now they have a landing page. No design file. No dev ticket. No waiting. The distance between "we have an idea" and "it's live" shrinks from weeks to hours, and the result still looks like it was designed—because it was. We designed the system. They're composing within it.

But here's what actually matters: they can tell new stories now. A seasonal campaign that celebrates Día de los Muertos with Papel Cortado borders throughout. A community spotlight page framed with the God's Eye to signal its importance. A product launch that shifts the visual tone section by section to match the product's flavor profile. None of those pages existed at launch. We didn't design them. But Siete's team could build them using their full cultural and visual vocabulary, not a limited set of approved layouts. The brand isn't frozen. It's living.

There's a strong instinct in website projects to focus on the pages—what does the homepage look like, how does the product detail page flow. Those are good questions to start with, but if they're the only questions you ask, you end up with a site that's frozen at launch. Every new idea requires a developer to thaw it out. Every story you want to tell has to fit the shapes you already made.

The better question—the one that determines whether a website is still serving you two years from now—is: what system are we building? What are the primitives? What are the rules for combining them? Because here's what I've learned building these things: all content is patterns. Every brand already has a visual vocabulary—colors, textures, framing, rhythm. Cultural brands like Siete have even richer vocabularies, rooted in heritage and meaning. The job isn't to apply that vocabulary to a fixed set of pages and walk away. It's to encode that vocabulary into a system that the brand's own team can use to say new things, in their own voice, whenever they need to.

That's what we built for Siete. Not a set of pages that were perfect on launch day, but a system that lets the brand keep living. Because a great website isn't a finished artifact. It's a foundation for the stories you haven't thought of yet.