Blocs Advantages vs Disadvantages?

General Discussion
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I was an early adopter of Blocs and have purchased all the upgrades over time, but I have never plunged deep into it for client work. Historically I have been using Dreamweaver and PVII extensions for the past 20 years to build websites for all my 100+ clients. Unfortunately PVII vanished this year without warning and DW is on life-support apparently. Therefore, I am having to decide on which platform to migrate to.

Mainly I am wondering what the Pros and Cons are in switching to Blocs over something like Square Space, etc. My biggest fear is what I just went through with PVII going out of business overnight and leaving me with no support!

Any incite or advice appreciated!

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Hi Choreo:

I used BOTH of those years ago.

I don’t have 100+ clients, but my move to Blocs is something I have not regretted.

I hope someone who is in the same situation (lots of websites) as you, will respond and tell you about their moves.

One thing I will say, if you use Squarespace, your sites will all look the same, and I would guess you’d end up paying lots more.

Rich the Weather Guy

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Ado$e crippled Dreamweaver years ago and have essentially turned it into abandonware unfortunately. Minuscule maintenance mode for 5 years, what’s baked in is aging rapidly or grossly outdated.

Regarding Project VII, sadly it all came quickly crashing down (as you know) when co-founder Al Sparber died in June of 2019, they went on for a while but lost traction quickly until they closed.

Some feel Wappler from DMXzone is the successor to Dreamweaver, that’s perhaps subjective person to person. Pinegrow is another Dreamweaver alternative, again subjective to each individual. With the later you may be able to open your projects and make edits certainly via code or visually in many areas.

If you own Blocs and have all the updates, please spend adequate time getting to know the workflow and come to your own decision regarding if it will meet your personal and professional requirements or not. You can list and post your “must have requirements / features” and someone can express if Blocs can fulfill those, or in what manner you can approach them within Blocs (inbuilt features, add-ons, code, etc.,).

In the end your personal requirements are the essential factor. Can you accomplish and achieve what you and your clients need. Whereas advantages, disadvantages, pros and cons can be subjective from user to user. You need to be clear with yourself pertaining to your own specific needs.

So, give Blocs an earnest go for new sites definitely, but also for rebuilding others also. You should quickly realize how and if Blocs will actually fit into your toolset and needed requirements. How did it go the last time, success ?

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Hey @Choreo,

Welcome back to the Blocs community :waving_hand:

As you are probably already aware, Blocs is focused on visual design rather than code, which I believe is the opposite with Dreamweaver. If you like to get into the weeds coding your websites, then you may find Blocs restrictive, however there are various entry points and places you can tinker with code.

Another consideration, is the fact Blocs has its own file format (.bloc), this means you can’t open any coded websites in Blocs, you would need to remake them. But because of the way Blocs works, that may not be a big deal, as building layouts with Blocs takes seconds. We also have a feature called the Extractor (Requires Blocs Plus) that lets you extract, images, colours and fonts from any live website. You can see it in action here pulling all the images from a webpage into Blocs. The Extractor is a huge time-saver for pros redesigning client sites.

One of the things Blocs users love is the fact that the app is very capable and has a lot of functionality built-in and that the feature set is always being expanding.

We have introduced over 50 new features since the release of Blocs 6 (November 2024) and have recently added an addition 30+ in Blocs 6.3, which is currently in public beta testing.

I’m not sure if you are aware, but Blocs also has an active marketplace, which also includes templates and add-ons for Blocs, so if there are features that Blocs doesn’t offer, then you may find a solution on the Blocs Store.

Something else worth noting is the fact Blocs is multi-platform, so if you want flexibility, Blocs is available as a native Mac, iPad and iPhone app (still in beta). Blocs project files can be opened and edited between all 3 versions, which offers a lot of flexibility.

Since you already own Blocs, I would suggest starting with a small project.

If you do choose to build a client site with Blocs, the following resources will no doubt help speed up the learning process.

Blocs Knowledge Base

Blocs Video Academy

And of course we have a very active and helpful community of users here in this forum :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:.

Finally, good luck finding a replacement, I know it’s a big decision.

:smiley:

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And let’s not forget the incredible help you get on this forum. There are some real experts here who seem to have a solution for almost any problem. There’s one person, in particular, who I swear has an answer for everything. I won’t name names, but it starts with an “E” and ends with “ldar”… :smirking_face:

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Yes, @Eldar’s Minimalist Library and Blocs Master courses are invaluable for many users, he certainly deserves direct credit for his efforts. Those offerings may likewise really help your transition with finally onboarding with Blocs.

Another important thing to note is that Blocs exported source is pretty standard Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, JS. Most developers could carry on with it inside IDE’s or apps like Pinegrow could easily open it to continue work. So the export is certainly portable, that can be part of a backup plan, if you’re concerned, also for your clients if something ever happens to you.

The Blocs email form still uses jQuery for validation and some third party Brics may still also.

Some 3rd party developers have seemingly left ( like Whittfield unfortunately ) so there is always the chance of that if you decide to rely heavily upon Blocs add-ons. There will always be a level of risk as you have experienced, regardless of what you decide, but you can mitigate risks the best you can with genuine decisions.

Your personal requirements are the essential factor. Give Blocs a try.

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One time purchase, no subscriptions and local workflow. It’s like when Sony launched PS1 at $299.

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For me I used Adobe GoLive back in the day then onto dreamweaver, and was an early adopter of Adobe Edge animated html, however like all things Adobe, they pull the rug form under your feet, more recently Adobe XD is in maintenance mode so Adobe have an awful history of not giving a crap. For me the jump to blocs was great as you can still use more code aligned software with it, same goes for Tumult Hype instead of Adobe animation and Figma instead of XD. I use these for both freelance as well as within my company.

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