I am building a corporate intranet with a totally custom design and need to use CWQP in order to pull data from lists (home page carousel and quick links) and subsites (news article rollups etc).
Pretty much every online resource I find mentions dropping the CQWP on a page and then exporting, make changes and the re-import.
Am I correct in thinking that this is only if I want to build re-usable web parts where the content author won't need to configure the query, just drop the component in and publish?
As my templates are quite static, is it ok/best practice to just use Sharepoint designer and drop a CQWP into a page layout (home page layout for example) and not in an editable web part region?