Digital Marketing Insider (I.A.N.4): 1-26-24

🎉 🎊 Greetings, Marketers! 🎉 🎊

Welcome back to the heart of our "Internal Author Newsletters" (I.A.N.), your Friday beacon of marketing insights, released faithfully at 5 am ET. Your warm feedback from last week fueled our excitement! 🙌

Today's spotlight? WordPress Block Themes and the Evolution of CMS 🌐✨

Our seasoned guide on this WordPress jaunt is none other than Walt Irby, our Director of Development. A true maestro when it comes to navigating the dev landscape!

Stay engaged, stay inspired. Every Friday, let's unravel the brilliance together.

Why WordPress Block Themes are the Future of CMS for Marketers

In an era where digital marketing is the cornerstone of every successful business, having an efficient and flexible marketing website, or Content Management System (CMS), is crucial.

WordPress, with its innovative block editor, has emerged in recent years as the best CMS option for marketers today. This evolution in WordPress block themes is poised to make traditional page builders like Elementor, Divi, Visual Composer, and BeaverBuilder obsolete.

What is a WordPress block theme?

A WordPress block theme is a type of WordPress theme that fully utilizes the capabilities of the Gutenberg block editor, which allows users of all types (developers and marketers) to customize and control the design of their website using only blocks.

Block editing was introduced in WordPress core in December 2018 and has rapidly evolved ever since.

It’s a much more accessible, visual, and drag-and-drop editing experience than in the past. 

In contrast, classic WordPress theme development involved more custom fields, templates, and hardcoded pieces with a less-intuitive “WYSIWYG” editing experience – where in fact it was not “What You See Is What You Get” at all, but rather an edit screen chock-full of fields ambiguously corresponding to different parts of the page.

The power of the WordPress block theme as a CMS for marketers (not just developers)

The flexibility of WordPress block themes is a game-changer. It empowers marketers to create and edit unique and beautiful pages with ease, without needing to submit a time-consuming dev request.

This means that marketers can focus on what they do best: creating compelling content and converting visitors into customers.

WordPress block themes are able to do this by leveraging WordPress core (rather than requiring added plugins) to present an unparalleled level of layout, styling, and content flexibility.

When built right, these themes allow marketers to create unique and engaging content displayed using various blocks and layouts, all while maintaining the website's design and branding cohesiveness.

Prodev.io is a site we’re currently building that uses our WordPress Backbone. This logo slider, expand/collapse accordion, and testimonial carousel are all common blocks that we include– fully branded and extended per the client’s requirements.

Block themes adhere to the Full Site Editing (FSE) philosophy, which aims to provide users with more design freedom. The future of block theming with FSE could enable you to build your entire website using the block editor, without needing to know how to code.

The downfall of traditional page builders

Traditional page builders like Elementor, Divi, Visual Composer, and BeaverBuilder are essentially CMSs built on top of a CMS.

Once upon a time, when WordPress itself was lacking CMS capabilities, these page builders had a place, but with the advent of WordPress block themes and full site editing, they've become near useless — just a bloated CMS stacked on top of a (now) more powerful CMS. They slow down website performance (Core Web Vitals), give content maintainers “option overload,” and lead to a breakdown of website design and branding cohesiveness.

They also just create a mess of a site over time.

WordPress itself has become a truly capable CMS, offering all the features of these page builders, but in a more streamlined and efficient manner-- especially when built The WebMechanix Way.

The WebMechanix WordPress CMS

At WebMechanix, we've harnessed the power of WordPress block theming to build websites that are not only visually appealing, but also are a breeze to edit, blazingly fast, SEO-optimized, conversion-focused, and fully and properly tracked for efficient data analysis and insights.

Our developers know what marketers need before they even need it and we aim to deliver.

Blocks and block patterns are added to the page with ease.

A fully customizable WordPress “website-in-a-box”

A website built by WebMechanix starts with our ever-evolving WordPress Backbone codebase, which we extend to meet each client’s unique business objectives and project requirements.

The end result is the client’s very own custom block theme – complete with 15-20 (or more) blocks, each with their own various styling and layout settings, leaving the client with a ton of content presentation options that uphold their brand and site design.

Over the years, we've curated a "block library" containing all the various types of blocks we've built as parts of hundreds of website projects. If you need a very specifically laid out section of content, we've probably got you covered-- even if it only serves as a jumpstart for development of the block.

Many of the blocks we've built (and could extend for you) are pretty slick conversion mechanisms with strong track records.

Zelis.com is a recent website we launched using our WordPress Backbone. Here’s a self-selector “Solutions Showcase” block from their homepage that has fast-tracked many users down their paths of conversion.

The “Kitchen Sink” that stores everything until you need it

Our approach to building websites with a WordPress block theme includes a "Kitchen Sink" page that showcases all available blocks for use, ready to simply copy, paste, and either reuse or repurpose on other pages. This makes it super easy for marketers to understand the full range of options available for displaying content.

We also include essential, reusable templates ("block patterns") for common content types like website pages, paid landing pages, blogs, and a resource library (whitepapers, ebooks, etc.).

1st Step Behavioral Health is another recent website we launched using our WordPress Backbone. Here’s an example of our “Kitchen Sink” page.

One of our very own – Stacey Heubeck, Senior Marketing Strategist – recently got the opportunity to help one of our clients migrate their website from Squarespace to our WordPress Backbone.

She had this to say about the experience: “Updating content on a page should be as easy as clicking a button — literally. And with our WordPress Backbone, it's that simple.”

“Gone are the days when fixing a typo or optimizing a meta title takes an email thread and a 48+ hour turnaround time. Plus, with our library of native modules, I was able to design my page layout myself in some pretty neat ways to really help the content stand out.”
– Stacey Heubeck, Senior Marketing Strategist

The CMS for marketers is here to stay

The future of CMS for marketers is here, and it's all about WordPress block theming, which is set to revolutionize the way we build and manage websites. Block theming offers the flexibility, efficiency, and power that marketers need to succeed in the digital age.

It's time to say goodbye to bloated page builders and embrace the future with WordPress block themes.

In the end, what matters most is delivering a seamless user experience on both the front and back ends of your marketing website.

The WebMechanix DevTeam has learned how to leverage and extend block theming to deliver a CMS that is a digital marketer’s new favorite tool.

Want to learn more about how WebMechanix can help with your website project? Let’s talk.

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