Help for displaying website examples on a website?

One caveat. If you build these using Volt, they’ll have to be at the root level and not in separate folder.

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yeah - I will do, thank you.

At the bottom of each site (or each page in the global footer) I will create a link back to the main site and also link to other demo sites.

Hi @Flashman - fab! I haven’t got Volt yet - I will get it at some point or when its requested for a blog at some point or CMS. I will mention this is an option for future sites and see where this takes me !

I know you are doing several sites with Volt, how are you getting on with it?

I am currently using Volt on jobs for three separate clients. Two are basically cases where the clients just want the ability to alter gallery images to reflect recent projects. One is a landscape gardener and the other does artistic tiling.

The third is a project to build 12 mini sites that all use the same basic layout and appearance, however we change the text considerably in each case to reflect the local geographic area and avoid having them look like doorway sites. These have been set up as local hubs for a company with a nationwide network of engineers.

The great part with the mini sites is that once the main design was agreed I can now edit content on a draft domain, then just copy across the database to the final destination and export the rest of the site normally.

I put in most the text myself and the client can then login to edit themselves before going live. If they need to change something in future like work hours or covid updates those areas are editable. Best of all maintenance afterwards should be virtually zero and there is a limit to how much clients can mess up. Contrast that with WordPress, which is a whole different story.

I produced a quick demo video for the client showing how Volt worked on their own site and they worked out the rest themselves. Not all clients will be that good, but I think the video tutorials go a long way towards easing your stress. Another good point is that clients can upload silly large images and Volt will downsize them for web to a specified size, which is all done via the server.

Volt won’t do everything by any means and there are some cases where you’ll need something like WordPress or Magento. I am building a site at the moment for a client who wants to sell Christmas turkeys online and we’ll do that using WordPress with Ecwid. At the moment I am not that comfortable with WordPress and still learning the ropes, whereas Volt feels pretty straightforward in Blocs.

If you think you are likely to use Volt at some stage for whatever purpose I would just go ahead and buy it. Having looked at various alternatives it seems to be the obvious choice with active development and made specifically for Blocs. @Jannis is regularly on the forums and we never hear from the others.

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Sounds like you have got your teeth into some nice projects - nice one !

Ecwid with Blocs looks good too - I saw the video on youtube that @Eldar did and he showcased it brilliantly. I will at some bring Ecwid into a website when i get the ball rolling fully in my new projects.

I would probably use WooCommerse if I was using wordpress and if you had to use it if your client insists on it, i would 100% go with Elementor and do the 1 site package, you might event get away with using the free version and getting basic plugins for the header/footer/form but for elementor woocommerce then go pro.

If I to settle to Ecwid, i would 100% do this within Blocs and eliminate Wordpress - Woocommerse as you know if very in depth too…so not sure how many variations of Turkeys other than sizes etc you could do? - I should hope your Turkey is sorted as part of the deal !

At some point in the not too distant future we should be able to design themes for WP in Blocs and export without a lot of the bloat typically associated with page builders like Elementor. That should deliver fast performance with reduced chance of conflicts.

As a very real example, a friend of mine is a photographer with a WP site built with some page builder and it goes offline every week with one problem or another requiring maintenance. Earlier today it had too many redirects, which has now been fixed but still no images at time of writing.

Norm explained it pretty well here General Question - Wordpress/Blocs pros and cons - #10 by Norm

Ecwid and WooCommerce both have pros and cons. In this instance the client wants the flexibility to make changes in future, potentially adding more pages etc, so WordPress seems like the logical, albeit reluctant solution from my perspective. I haven’t told the client I stopped eating meat last year, but the cat should be sorted until August.

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I see the use case :turkey: :wink:

At one point we are able to do this with Volt CMS also :+1:

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Wait… sell turkeys online with volt? I‘m in :nerd_face:

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Having the name of @Pumpkin you need to get the turkey selling online for Thanksgiving (and you @Flashman) ! :smiley:
@AdieJAM, honestly, go and purchase VoltCMS, it’s great and @Jannis is a great support. I’m very pleased with how it’s all progressing just being a part-time user.

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Hi @TrevReav - I will do 100%, I am waiting for when my new business kick starts and then have a client who is requesting it (Covid has left me financially in a mess at the moment for the 1st time in my life - so will strike when the irons hot! - hopefully the page lock/password will be finalised by when i get it)

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I would also suggest you buy it soon rather than later if you can. So you have time to get familiar with working with it. Be a lot easier without client pressure.

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Yeah I was just thinking about that, would be good to bring it into one of my own sites to play with - it’s high on my list.

Hey @Flashman, i actually heard from a guy today who has around 30 websites on Elementor and the new update to fix the last 5 updates! he has updated and they are totally breaking his websites, he has dialled back into an older version of Elementor but now some of the plugins which were updated to work on the new Elementor will not work and he is unable to take them back, so he is having to get new plugins to fix the plugins that won’t work till Elementor fix the latest problems and then bring the original plugins back!

Twitter and forums are going crazy with everyone having issues again. They brought out a huge update a couple of weeks back and a few updates to fix the bugs on those since and its not been a good time for them. So thats made me make my mind up with that one !!! Good job I only have the free one and using it for my landing page for now, while using Blocs to make my new actual site.

Yes we sometimes hear complaints about bugs in Blocs but they are small beer compared to what some of the others are experiencing. When I spoke to that photographer yesterday he told me he has 29 plugins and it’s basically plugins to fix plugins with ever more bloat and complication.

My frustration at times with clients comes when they think WP is the answer to everything and that it’s simple. That’s just not the case.

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yeah - its crazy, i really only ever looked at the greatness of the builders and not the issues and the current issues are huge. One guy I was reading has a 340 something page website and the whole design has thrown out and his team have all had to jump on it. He has said he has got back ups, but the back ups are conflicting on the new wordpress, elementor and over 40 various plugins and a 3rd party plugin for the blogging system as its a news related website in USA from what i was reading this morning and they get news from other tabloids point to him and its just crashed it all!

I am no expert in wp so would not have a clue if this is backed up how it all works…but this must be a huge stress on him to get this sorted.

But looking on how they are doing it - guess WP is the best solution for them though as its a hugely dynamic site. But shows how fragile it is.

Didnt Elementor have a massive new update? I am surprised sites like that are deploying big updates without test servers first.

Yeah - thats the new update which has thrown literally thousands of websites out, they tried to improve the header & footer builder and several other things and its all conflicted. Even though many had back ups, they are taking it back to the older Elementor and it’s thrown those out too.

I think they have had a few updates on those and the last one has made things worse !!!

A few people have said they are moving to Divi instead as they have done an email campaign or something saying - " Ours isn’t broken…so we haven’t tried to fix it " which I have not found as yet - but lots of left.

I only have the free one as was playing around with it as I had someone who wanted to do lots with me on Elementor, but even they have stopped using it now.

Is it possible to also use Volt CMS in this way?

I can’t get it working.

What do you mean exactly?

I mean that the new website is in a separate folder and the index.html with the Volt core bric is too. Does that work? Hope I clear enough