Manual newsletter on a subdomain?

[AdieJAM]

Hi all,

I have a client that wants to create a wacky monthly newsletter style blog! Now they want each page to have a totally different feel.

Example, Christmas newsletter he wants snow falling on the page, and it to be ice blue and all Christmas promotions to sales for their company etc and the. Change it slightly after the sale.

I will do this manually as the layout will be varied each page,

Now my question is - would the news letter style page be better run on a subdomain of the original domain, so I am not touching the main domain each time I do a newsletter?……SEO is a huge part of the newsletter page too, so I am guessing it this should be on the actual domain itself than a sub domain as splitting it can be bad for SEO from what I’m reading.

I was thinking of doing it so the menu & footer is the same and looks the same from that side, so feels like it’s all on the same site - just run the newsletter on a sub domain but Good SEO.

I did consider Volt as a huge fan, but for what they want I will do a manual page each month for them as no 2 pages will be the same.

Thanks all!

[Malachiman]

You could place it in a folder of your main domain. That way you get nice urls…

Eg.

‘’mywebsite.com/newsletter/2022-jan-27.html’’

[hendon52]

I agree with @Malachiman - folders are the way to go. I use folders for creating landing pages for promotions and they work just fine and keep everything separate from the main website.

[AdieJAM]

Thank you @Malachiman and @hendon52

This will make a lot more sense to do and look much better.

So I get my head around how this works:

So I build my website with say 5 page links in the menu. Link 2 will say for example newsletter.

Then I open up a fresh blocs project and create the same footer and header as my main website and build the pages for the Newsletter and have a folder called newsletter on my root folder and drag it in there when I update it?

How I do get away from the home page on the fresh build?

Or I have go this totally wrong!

Thanks guys.

[hendon52]

The newsletter link from your main site navigation only has to point to the newsletter folder - it’s assumed that the newsletter site will have index.html as its home page. Likewise, the home link on both sites will point to your main domain. Personally, I wouldn’t bother about creating a full navigation structure on the newsletter page - keep it as a newsletter site that opens in a new tab/window and just make sure there is a link back to the main domain. This way, you can send out the newsletter URL to people independently of the main site. I do this with landing pages. I don’t include landing page links in the main site navigation. Instead, I place a prominent call to action button that takes people to the landing page when clicked. You can do the same thing with your newsletter pages - just have a nice big button that takes visitors to the latest newsletter. On the newsletter page, you only need another button to take people back again - a Return to Main Site Button.

Here is an example of a home page call to action in a main site:

Clicking the call to action button opens a landing page in a folder within the main site structure. It opens in a new tab/window. The logo, takes people back to the main site home page:

This will work fine for a periodic newsletter because it makes the newsletter link a more prominent feature of the main site page - thus encouraging people to click the link. If you have the link hidden away in a main navigation, it can be easily missed.

[Flashman]

This is basically how I build draft sites for clients. I use one domain and then each website is placed in a separate folder. It doesn’t work with Volt though, which needs to be at the root level. If you are just building straight Blocs sites those newsletters could go in individual folders.

[AdieJAM]

Thanks @Flashman @hendon52 @Malachiman

My knowledge of this is a little vague how to deliver this.

I totally understand what your saying and also understand on keeping it as one folder - but wondering how to delivery the newsletter page as a file?

So for my example for this I am saying my website has 3 pages:
Home - Newsletter - Contact

I build the website home page and contact us page and 100% leave the Newsletter page?
Do I then open Blocs and build the newsletter as a whole separate item and drop this into folder of the main document? (So will have to ensure all the fonts etc are all the same on both )
Then when I want to update the newsletter, I just add more pages and add it?

How do I go about removing the home page on the newsletter build if this is the way? - do i simply remove this from export? I can have the URLs then set as Pete has said:

mysite.co.uk/newsletter/january22
mysite.co.uk/newsletter/new-stock
etc etc

So when I do an updated newsletter page - I just save this as a folder and drop this folder in of the main domain and just overwrite this each time I update - keeping the actual website not touched.

Ade

[Jannis]

@AdieJAM

Christmas newsletter he wants snow falling on the page

Try to convince your client not to have snow falling on the page

You could also create for each newsletter a blog post with Volt CMS, but then you don’t have the flexibility of having different layouts.

[AdieJAM]

Hi @Jannis - yeah, Volt is what i pushed for…and still am ! but its the flexibility of layouts, designs, dropping full screen videos in on promo events etc they want me to look after.

I will keep trying ! lol

[hendon52]

Will the newsletter be a multi-page or a single page - I’m thinking in terms of a PDF file. Such a file would typically open in a new window so it can be read online. This would then be downloadable. If you wanted to keep the newsletter as HTML for online viewing, you could include a download link to a PDF version.

As for updating, I would tend to have one folder named current_newsletter and just upload the current newsletter web page to the same folder every time. This will overwrite the previous newsletter including its index file. If you wanted to keep an archive of newsletters, just move the existing newsletter to a new folder (say a folder named january etc.) before overwriting the current newsletter. That way you can have an archive section in your site that points to the various month folders.

[Malachiman]

@Jannis

Try to convince your client not to have snow falling on the page

This

The novelty of this effect died early 2000’s I think

[AdieJAM]

Hi @hendon52

thanks.

I did mentioned a PDF but they do want it as HTML as want it to help SEO too.
It will be a single page for each newsletter and they will archive them too - bit like a blog, I will create it all manually.

For ease it might just be as simple as just adding pages to the website and updating it each time they need it doing - but was hoping to just add the page and not keep having to add the whole website, but your way of naming the folders could work.

So I am guessing - just build the website as one and when I change add a newsletter, I just manually add that folder rather than the whole website.

[AdieJAM]

haha !!!

Yeah we all saw a Christmas newsletter we all had in the events industry from a lighting company and to be fair, it was pretty classy…the snow built up on the footer and the actual snow sat on images on the page and when your scrolled up and down it shook the snow off the images and back to the footer !

Not something I have ever seen before and was really cool.

[hendon52]

@AdieJAM Yep, I think that’s the way to go. Just create a one page website for the newsletter and upload it to the server into its own folder. If you want to keep some common elements from the main site (navigation, footer etc.) just save those blocs as custom blocs and include them on the newsletter page. If you want a downloadable version, Use blocs to export the page as an image, and use that as the file for download. If you want the file to be PDF, just open the image in Apple preview and export/save it to PDF. You would then include a link on the newsletter page that downloads the PDF file. When you publish, the PDF will go along for the ride.

[AdieJAM]

Thank you @hendon52 - I have made notes of all this and when it comes to build, I will have a play around and test this - thank you.

[Jannis]

@AdieJAM

I did mentioned a PDF but they do want it as HTML as want it to help SEO too.

If you create for each newsletter an own subdomain, how will Google crawler take note of it? Will you reference the new subdomain on the main website with a link? I doubt you going to register every new subdomain inside the Google search console with an own sitemap.

[hendon52]

I don’t think @AdieJAM is going to use subdomains - I think the idea is to use folders for the newsletters. These will be linked to from the main domain with corresponding link back to the main website through the navigation structure. These links will get crawled by search engines as long as they are not set to no-follow.