Vertical Site Conventions

Vertical Site Conventions

Compose pages and whole sites to the layout, density, and merchandising conventions that make a build read as a credible member of its vertical. Stack-agnostic. Works on any framework that can express server-rendered pages and component composition.

This skill owns vertical-level composition: which modules go where, how dense the page is, how much of the catalog or offering is surfaced, and which paths the navigation serves. It routes the day-to-day visual decisions to design-standards, the aesthetic register to creative-direction, the site-structure modeling to information-architecture, and the component implementation to frontend-component-build. It does not duplicate any of them; it composes their outputs into a vertical-correct site.

It is the build-side counterpart to competitor-experience-audit. The audit measures the field on seven dimensions; this skill builds to those same seven, dimension by dimension. The two are deliberately structured as two sides of one standard so an experience bar produced by the audit maps one-to-one onto what this skill builds.

When to use

• Building a new site in a vertical you have not built in before
• Fixing a build that reads as generic or off-vertical even though it is technically clean (the SEO, accessibility, and component implementation are correct, but the page does not read like its category)
• Building to an experience bar produced by competitor-experience-audit (the audit-fed path is the intended use)
• Adding the merchandising, density, and navigation conventions a site in this category is expected to carry
• Building a showcase or demo where the build must read as its vertical, not as a generic SaaS landing page

When NOT to use

• Day-to-day visual decisions on a known build (use design-standards)
• Defining the brand register or aesthetic from scratch (use creative-direction, brand-archetype-system, brand-discovery)
• Building one component well (use frontend-component-build)
• Modeling site structure and navigation hierarchy from scratch (use information-architecture)
• Building a formal design system or token system (use design-system)
• Auditing the competitive field for what conventions exist (use competitor-experience-audit; this skill consumes that audit's output, it does not produce it)

Required inputs

• The site shape the build is for, from the controlled list: ecommerce-catalog, inventory-listing, directory-marketplace, local-service-booking, subscription-app, hospitality-food, institution-mission, b2b-manufacturer, ecommerce-standout, hospitality-experience.
• An experience bar from competitor-experience-audit (the cross-site patterns and gaps for the vertical). If absent, the skill falls back to the per-shape default conventions in the references; the audit-fed path is stronger and is the intended use.
• The brand register and aesthetic decisions (from creative-direction or already settled). This skill does not redefine them.
• The framework or technical context the build will use (the skill is stack-agnostic but the consumer needs to know).

If the site shape is unclear, ask. Building to the wrong shape's conventions produces a build that reads off-vertical, which is the exact failure this skill exists to prevent.