Sulu’s Blocks deliver Value for Businesses

Editors, salespeople, and marketers are the experts when it comes to creating content that is tailored to your audience’s needs. While structured content is a priority, imposing tight constraints on your staff can stop them reaching their potential. Blocks strike this balance very well: editors can be freed to create lead-converting content while storing it neatly in a machine-readable format. As a business, you’ll be able to derive more value if you motivate expert staff by giving them the best tools for the job.

Similarly, editors can be more productive with a smartly implemented Blocks strategy and for large, worldwide enterprises, these gains can quickly add up. This is because editors are less likely to get frustrated with an overgrown administration interface. With fewer templates to get confused by, editors can get started faster and build the layout that does the job for them.

In the words of Nils Langner, Founder of Leankoala:

Gone are the days when editors treated their CMS as a word processor with a publish button. Even so, some people still expect to insert images in a WYSIWYG editor, or change font size and color. State-of-the-art CMSs like Sulu deliberately limit the options available to individual editors, choosing instead to leave questions of design to designers. This is another reason why structured content is key: it is held separately from design, so your branding stays the same across the organization. And if you have a redesign along the way, you won’t need to rework your content because content and design are separate. With Sulu, you can even reuse the same content across brands in multi-brand organizations. This is a great balance between editor freedom and design consistency, which can present huge long-term cost savings for medium-sized and global enterprises.

Today, we hear a lot about headless technology, the Internet of Things, and next-generation content channels. Sulu can operate as a headless or decoupled CMS, but to take advantage of API-accessible content you need to structure it well. This enables you to reuse content on other devices, not just web pages, and squeeze yet more business value out of the content your expert staff have created. With this structured approach, you future-proof your content so you have the best chance of being able to continue using it even on devices that are yet to become widespread.

Of course, Sulu can’t work miracles — we’re assuming you already have good content architecture, and that your website design is robust even when you reorder the content blocks on a page.

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Developers are notoriously difficult to recruit. Their time is expensive, so it’s best to use it sparingly. While blocks may admittedly take longer to setup than templates, in the long run you will save costs if you allow yourself the time to get it right. This is because a block that works well can be used across your whole organization’s website, or even many different websites if you use Webspaces. Any improvements or bug-fixes are available to all editors. You’ll have less code to maintain because you won’t need as many templates, and editors can get on with their work instead of asking developers to build new templates for them. The larger your organization, the more you can save with economy-of-scale effects.