Now I’m planning to extend my services with Blocs users… hehe what do you think of a custom made blocs based on your current non blocs website hehe 
Adding to Projects because now we have @Eldar’ Blocs Template, Blocs Master and @Blocs_Guy’s Hosting hihi
So your service would help to recreate peoples existing sites into Blocs sites ? Or you would replicate elements found on various sites into Blocs templates for reuse by users ?
Just curious for more clarification.
Thank you for the interest. The service is like requesting a Custom Made .blocs files Template. So if you have an old Website and want to use Blocs App for editing but you don’t have knowledge with designing site you can request then we’ll provide you the .bloc file for you to edit as you want
Thanks for the clarification, it was kind of vague initially. Best wishes with your endeavor of leveraging your design skills to help fellow Blocs users, seems like a viable idea.
But how will you handle websites that have a large amount of tabular data, seeing that Blocs presently has no way to create responsive “tables” to hold such data? The following webpage in one of my Japanese sites serves as an example of tabular data (in the middle section of the page):
It is a vehicle compatibility chart for the product mentioned on that page. There are many other such pages in that site.
Now for my second question…
How will you handle Sitewide SEARCH? This too is presently lacking in Blocs. If you scroll to the bottom of the above web page, at the bottom left you will see a search field. This is tied to Google Custom Search.
The site at that URL was originally designed in SoftPress Freeway Pro 7. I’ve taken a long hard look at Blocs and I love what I see. However, I don’t see an easy means of creating a responsive table or site wide search in Blocs. And although my existing made-in-Freeway site is NOT responsive, I obviously would move to Blocs only to modernize my existing websites into something responsive. Even so, ditching existing features (e.g., throwing out my tables and search feature) simply to move to a responsive Blocs-built site is not something I am willing to do.
I’ve spoken to Norm about this on FreewayTalk and other places. And perhaps in a future update of Blocs EASY creation of tabular data and an EASY site wide search feature might be implemented, but for now they don’t exist. And so that is why I ask these questions to you, mackyangeles, to see how your business built on Blocs would address such features should your customers ask for them.
Many thanks,
James
Hi @JDW, thank you for having an interest on my services, for search I can embed a Google Search for it. As for the Table. All elements that’s under Blocs are the once to be applied to the .bloc site. I can code everything manual but you will choose the the Xtreme Package for it. Everything is doable and can be made thru Blocs it’s just the matter of how to translate it to a Blocs version and using the components available. You can rethink the structure to make it more friendly and to make it less cluttered that’s how simple Blocs is
I have another question, which no doubt a good number of us ponder when we consider moving our site to Blocs from what we are using now — PAGE SPEED. The following are performance rankings for the Blocs website, the Blocx website, and one of my websites (made in Freeway Pro 7):
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblocsapp.com&tab=mobile
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blocx.site&tab=mobile
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkiramek.com
My website isn’t responsive and as a result it does not look beautifully modern; however, I do get a 97% GOOD Mobile score and respectable 83/100 for the Desktop score. In contrast, the Blocs sites both yield a “POOR” score for Mobile, and only the Blocs website gets 77/100 for the Desktop score. Are these lackluster performance rankings inherent to all Bootstrap “responsive” sites, or is it simply the lack of optimizations in Blocs-generated sites?
Thanks,
James
Hi @JDW, well… this is the common issues blocs users currently encountering. One point is having it not optimized well as of images and other contents. But for the speed without consulting the Google Optimization process I think Blocs does create a fast approach using Bootstrap. And as far as I know comparing other builders for Mac, Blocs serves well on building the well optimized write-ups and codes. I’m from Adobe Muse and 100% transfered all my projects here because because I can manually optimize my images without loosing its quality. I’m not keen on checking the speed every now and then because every country has a different connection to it but I assure you that Blocs does use Bootstrap faster that it can be
I don’t have time at the moment to investigate the specifics of individual websites, however I’m inclined to think that Page Speed results are not that useful. The last time I checked, they failed to take account of changes in best practices with http2 for example and made no allowance for factors such as retina resolution.
I used to work with Freeway 6 up to about 3 years ago, producing websites that were not responsive. Miraculously they would score really well for mobile in Page Speed, but in practice they were about as useful as a chocolate teapot to those who would visit the site on a mobile.
There are many factors that affect site speed, including much that is server related. There are features I would like to see in Blocs for real world speed improvements that are not available in Freeway either, but on the whole Blocs sites have always looked pretty fast to me. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of users nowadays are linking to external services, such as Facebook, Vimeo and Twitter etc that all impact on page loading speed.
Most likely the content on the Blocs site effects it’s score. It currently loads a 6MB video as a background, if I speed checked it without that it would score a lot better.
A proper way to compare would be to build the Blocs website in Freeway with all the same animations, videos, and responsiveness and then compare. Comparing a site you made against one in Blocs only works if they are identical in appearance and data structure.
I think the biggest factor in page speed is usually the amnesia we developers have when it comes to asset sizes/sites. Blocsapp is using the bootstrap framework so there should be no major differences with any other site using that framework. Every time we add a thumbnail or image on the page involves another round trip to the server.
People should look further than the page builder tools and at the way the internet works.
That’s also a very good reason to be using http2, because it’s much more efficient at downloading content, however it does require different practices for best results. https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-2-for-web-developers/
This is largely server related though and if you are a speed maniac like me, you might be using Polish, Lightspeed, Railgun and more. Rest assured that sites built with Blocs can be extremely fast, assuming reasonable page sizes and not overdoing callouts to external services. For example I found that Vimeo was a major drag on page loading, simply because it wanted to load analytics from the other side of the world.
I think most of us don’t worry too much about being super efficient. Blocsapp users aren’t building large sites and as long as sites load in a reasonable time and the client is happy, then I’m happy.
It depends very much on what you are doing. If you are selling online then speed makes a big difference to conversion rates and also has an impact on your search ranking. I don’t see Blocs as being a hindrance to achieving that goal though.
