Page builders. Never quite seem to work the way you want them to. A struggle to find the block you need. Looks great when editing but different when published. Untrustworthy. Unmanageable. Nightmare.
Sound familiar?
We've heard this countless times from prospective clients, and in this day and age there's no excuse. Building pages should be a breeze. Dreamy. Like an all-inclusive holiday in the magical Isles of Content.
A good Page Builder lets you create pages with minimal time, effort, or technical knowledge
If you're reading this, chances are you've used some sort of page builder before.
They let you add content modules to page, add content, change some options for design, and publish your pages—all without needing to talk to a developer.
Some let you design absolutely anything you want (though it doesn't always look good :grimacing:).
Some are so inflexible, you have to rewrite your content to fit the blocks available, or worse remove content altogether.
And some are so cluttered and hard to use that you end up copying the same layout over and over and wishing for a better way.
Sanity CMS is that better way. Walk with me.
A Best-in-Class Page Builder is visual, flexible, and empowering
It should be a well-oiled machine—smooth, efficient, and reliable. It should work for your content, and help you present it in its best light. You shouldn't even really notice it—it should be that easy to use.
Most importantly, it should empower you, not frustrate you. It should give you autonomy and support your creativity when you have the time, and contribute to a high content velocity with sensible, reusable sections when you don't. Yes, you should be able to create a brand new landing page in under 10 minutes. Watch the video or read on to find out how.
Outer Blocks for Layout, Inner Blocks for content and flexibility
Gone are the days where a modular content block can't support your content because it doesn't have the right fields. By splitting blocks into Outer and Inner blocks, your page builder is juiced with content freedom.
Your Outer blocks focus on content layout - will it be a full-width page hero, a side-by-side image and content, or a cool parallax image effect?
And your Inner blocks combine to fill the Outer block with content. Title, Rich Text, Images, Partner Logos, Article Feed; whatever you need, in any order you need it, like adult-sized, page building lego blocks.
What's more, the Inner blocks know their context and adapt accordingly.
- Title's in a Hero will be H1, other Title's automatically take H2 or H3 as needed
- A dark background image will have inner Text change to a light colour automatically
No cluttered controls, no complex settings. Just content, as it should be.
Once an Inner block has been created, you can go on to use it anywhere on your site. The days of asking your development team or agency to add more fields to blocks are long gone.
Reusable Content Blocks for huge productivity and velocity gains
We mentioned that the ultimate page builder is not only flexible, but ensures you can create content fast. Going from 0 to live in minutes should not only be reality, it should be table stakes.
Enter: Reusable Blocks. Build once and re-use endlessly.
All sites should start with a library of common sections, pre-built from Outer and Inner blocks, removing any need to compose the base blocks until you're feeling creative. And as they're built from the same Outer and Inner blocks, adding, removing or reordering content is still a breeze.
Signposts, statistics, feature callouts, testimonials, carousels; you name it, there's a reusable block for it.
But you need'n't stop at just sections: re-use entire landing pages, purpose-built for clear messaging and irresistible calls-to-action, and get them live in minutes.
Page Building really has never been easy.
A Visual Block Picker you will fall in love with
"What's the difference between the callout and a signpost block? Which one will look the best? Oh, there's a call to action block too? Argh!", we hear you cry.
Long lists of impenetrable block names is not fun. Being able to compare what your blocks look like to choose best one is fun.
That's why a visual block picker is an absolutely must. And even better when those blocks are sectioned by type, tagged by use case, and searchable by name and metadata.
The Visual Block Picker helps Too Good To Go's editors stay confident and fast in what they're creating—seeing a preview of what the blocks look like without having to add, save, refresh, remove. It's a huge time saving for a busy, global editing team.
Uncluttered and Engaging Content Overview
It's important that all these blocks are able to show useful previews of their content, so that scanning them to understand a page's structure and where to make edits is easy and clear.
That's why your page builder blocks should show both the Outer and Inner blocks, following the document structure, with useful content displayed and un-useful controls hidden.
Each Outer and Inner block should display its block type, a title of predominant content, a subtitle of useful content, and a preview image or icon.
And with Sanity Visual Editing, finding where your content is edited has never been easier. There's now no need to look through the CMS at all to find content: just open your website, click on the exact paragraph you want to edit, and be taken immediately to it in the CMS. Click, Edit, Done.
Synchronised Content Blocks
Using reusable content, we can create sections for use in multiple places, like a call to action at the end of our landing pages. However, keeping this content in-sync across all these pages is a chore: it's boring work that's better automated.
That's why the ultimate page builder should also allow you to create synchronised blocks. Create them in a single place, select them from your block picker (with a preview image included!) and watch them magically stay synchronised across all areas they're used.
Need to change the copy in a single place? Desynchronise it and it becomes regular old Outer and Inner blocks again.
Need to see exactly which pages are using a synchronised block before editing? Each synced block comes with a list of "backlinks", to show exactly what pages are using it, and with one-click open up that page to edit.
Synchronised Content Blocks are great for BirdLife International. As a charity, BirdLife are geared around raising donations to further their work as the World's leader in bird conservation. Synchronised blocks allow them to create a set of end-of-page call-to-actions, with up-to-date, relevant information about campaigns, and channel users all across the site to their active donation campaign page—all with just a couple key presses.
Identical, Live-as-you-type Preview
Does this sound similar: building the perfect page, only to pop open the page to see your content smushed against the side of the screen, looking totally different to the preview?
The ultimate page builder demands no more surprises when going live. See an identical preview while editing, showing you the exact page your visitors will see. And with live-as-you-type, there's no more clicking Refresh or waiting 3 seconds for the page to update. Just an instant, identical preview. You'll never want to use another CMS again.
This is a huge step forward for international real estate advisor Pembroke, who needed accurate, real-time previews of their content, to allow their editorial team fast and confident content creation.
Want to skip straight to the good part?
You could build and configure all of this yourself—our video tutorials show you how—but if you just need a page builder that works, then let us sort it all for you.
Get in touch with us using the form below, and we'll get you set up with the ultimate page builder in no time.
If you're considering migrating from WordPress to SanityCMS get in touch with us for an informal chat.