Best Practices

Working with Cosmic to build websites should already feel intuitive. However, below are some guidelines that you can follow to get the best possible results.

Prompting Tips

Here are some prompting guidelines you can follow to have Cosmic adhere to your instructions.

1. Your first message to Cosmic will be always be treated as a planning step. This means Cosmic will not build anything right away, it will first ask some clarifying questions. Rather than inputting all of your specific project requirements at once, try giving Cosmic a high level overview of what you want to acheive first, and then following up with more details in the next message.
2. Don't send prompts that are longer than a few sentences at a time. Just like humans, Cosmic has a finite working memory. If your project has many requirements, try breaking up the development into smaller steps, as opposed to asking Cosmic to implement everything at once.
3. Make your messages clear and specific. If you see errors with your project, try pasting those errors from your browser into your message so Cosmic knows what you are referring to. Or if there are confusion points with multiple similar elements, then specify the correct element you are referring to.
4. Each message you send will trigger an iteration for Cosmic. Each iteration may take a long time depending on the complexity of your request, so don't waste messages.

Styling

Even without explicit prompting, Cosmic should build amazing websites and application out of the box. But you can also prompt Cosmic to follow your product vision exactly.

• Always try to accurately describe your desired color scheme and style.
• Provide explicit references to other popular products or websites if desired.

Integrating core functionality

Assets

You can upload your own files and assets in the Cosmic dashboard. It is recommended to upload them right after your first message, and then ask Cosmic to implement them into your project. Read more here.

Payments

It is generally recommended to first onboard with Cosmic Payments and then creating a few products before asking Cosmic to integrate payments into your project. This is so Cosmic has an understanding of what type of product you are selling. Read more about payments here.

Authentication and sign-in functionality

There is no set up required to have Cosmic integrate authentication into your project. However, best practice would be to first build out some portion of your project, and then dedicated a message to ask Cosmic to integrate authentication functionality, as it can be a heavy request. Read more about auth here.

Testing and Deployment

When you are building your project, Cosmic hosts your website in a preview deployment link. This link is publicly accessible, but ONLY functional when you have that specific project open.

If you want a permanent link to your project, then you must deploy using the button on the dashboard.