Our team has been so busy over our first year being live, we wanted to give some perspective as to how we got where we are today and where we're focusing on going forward. Look for many more updates in the future as we continue to rapidly enhance the platform and launch some incredible new features in the coming months.
Why We Built Blux
Before we set out to build Blux, we weren't satisfied with the workflows, technical outcomes, inadequate tools and general process of creating websites. Our team had collectively worked on hundreds of sites but knew there needed to be a better way. Regardless of process (i.e. agile, waterfall, etc.) website projects were rather linear in nature and would take anywhere from 2-6 months, depending on scope. They would roughly take the same general steps...
Challenges we kept experiencing were not unique to our own team but rather shared across the entire industry of web professionals. Resources were too hard to find, train and keep around. Projects took way too long. Setting up software and infrastructure was a chore. Websites cost way too much to build and maintain. Clients always seemed to have a hard time managing their own website, creating many complexities with client management.
Our initially small Blux team of three met to discuss how we'd go about solving these challenges. We looked at not only creating better technology but more importantly, putting web professionals at the core of what we were trying to help solve. We wanted to create a tool that optimized processes, reduced costs and was technically advanced.
Built for Professionals
The most important thing the Blux team wanted to accomplish was to build a tool meant uniquely for web professionals. Most web professionals aren't interested in entry-level "do-it-yourself" solutions. Those solutions don't typically have the flexibility that professionals desire.
On the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to reduce the complexities of building a website from scratch. Building anything from scratch can be a challenge, which is to be expected. But what if you could reduce the time it took to build? What if you could do more with less or less technical resources? What if you could reduce quality assurance? We asked A LOT of questions.
We decided to build Blux as a platform that's somewhat in the middle of the spectrum. Blux would provide the ease of entry-level solutions while squarely being a highly customizable tool that web professionals would want to use.
Once we identified our market, we focused on more specific traits, which led us to where Blux is today.
Reduced Time To Build - Sites that used to take months, can now be built in days.
Block-Based User Experience - Fit for another post entirely, but all websites are built on a responsive block system, allowing for infinite layouts and customization.
Friendly Content Management - A system that lets your clients actually manage their own websites.
Incredible Cloud Infrastructure - Everything built on Amazon Web Services to allow for UNLIMITED bandwidth and storage to our customers.
FAST Websites - Speed is make or break these days, especially on mobile. There's so many things we've done on this front but we focused a lot on achieving perfect Google Pagespeed Test scores, W3C standards-compliant code, Google Mobile tests and a lot more.
Solid Customer Support - An incredible support team, which constantly answers questions, supports customers and assists with custom solutions.
What's Coming Up
A lot is in development and/or testing right now. Our primary focus is to support customer websites but there's so many immediate features, which will be released in the coming weeks.
Localization - Translate your website into many different languages.
Usability enhancements - There's a lot of functionality in Blux. We'll continue to streamline and improve the interface to be as simple as possible.
Workflow improvements - Staging and production workflow enhancements, better workflow management and client reviews.
Mobile enhancements - Improved mobile site rendering as well as Blux app optimization on mobile and tablet devices.
Extending Blux - API enhancements to be able to build custom applications on top of/alongside Blux.
That's it for now! As we mentioned, look for many more future updates. If there's anything we can help answer for you, please drop us an email at [email protected].