I am looking for help, a Bloc designer to help me redesign my two websites. I have two travel websites that I want to move from Rapidweaver to Blocs. My B2B site is about 17 pages and is pretty straight forward (mainly static text) and my B2C site is about 90-100 pages. It is a little more difficult as I am really wanting to focus on SEO and creating landing pages for Adwords campaigns. I am not sure if the Blocs app is right for a site with 90-100 pages, maybe I will get some feedback on this. Additionally, I may want Volt CMS/Pulse or something like that to able to offer writers direct access to make some text changes. I am comfortable picking out a template and making that a good starting point moving forward.
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I think Blocs and Volt would be perfect for the job from what you say.
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Blocs is certainly capable of managing a site that is 90-100 pages, but let’s not kid ourselves, that is a large website on any platform if you are being thorough.
I’m working on one at the moment that is around 115 pages. You have the global and dynamic areas, plus you can set general styling in project settings, then apply custom classes, as well as numerous predefined blocs that can also be edited, duplicated and the rest. As an ex RW user myself I would say the biggest challenge is simply approaching Blocs with an open mind, rather than trying to make it work like RW. They are just different.
I would definitely favour Volt over Pulse CMS. Volt is actively supported by @Jannis with several users on this forum and it’s a one time purchase, no matter how many sites you build. I have also found it is client friendly for making changes in text and images.
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Blocs is absolutely capable of doing this, and IMHO having built RW sites with 100’s of pages, Blocs offers many significant advantages such as:
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A proper media manager that will allow you to use remote images throughout and also manage them all from within blocs. This will keep the file size significantly smaller than using local images stored inside the project file.
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Auto generation of webp images so you only have to use jpg images.
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The Class Editor will allow you to implement well structured layouts that could for example allow you to edit every page with one single edit in the ClassEditor.
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RW is in a state of conrtinuing turmoil in terms of where it is going, as you probably know, so this would be a good time to jump to Blocs for new builds. Starting a large project usng RW today carries great risk due to so much changing and so many unknowns.
Generally, large sites need careful planning to create the site on a minimum number of different types of pages or template pages, where only the text and image content changes.
If you are focussing on SEO then there will be no way around manually creating the specific SEO for each page. Although Blocs has a generous set of AI tools that may be possible to use AI to auto generate the SEO content from tha page content. Who knows, but certainly good food for thought further down the line.
Thinking out loud here, but wouldn’t a Bric that analysed each page text content and then populated the page SEO with auto gnerated content, be a fine thing?
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It’s called ChatGPT. Copy & paste with an appropriate prompt, but in theory this could be incorporated into Blocs natively without even needing a bric.
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We’re going a bit off topic here, but yes, exactly.
Creating good SEO is a big challenge for everyone really, so an auto Blocs tool or bric would be poweful function and particularly for large sites with 100’s of pages. 12 months this would have been a dream. With Blocs today, many of the pieces of this puzzle are in place.
It would have to be built into blocs, Brics don’t have access to the design canvas like that (and probably for good reason). But excellent idea and the way things are going. I read somewhere the other day something along these lines… ML is basically changing our role to project managers, we still have to understand what’s going on, but ML is a tool that augments the developer.
Bringing back to the OP though, Volt is great! And helpful post/info from @webdeersign further above to think through.