Revolutionising Building Websites with Framer Plugins

Hi! I’m Wes, the co-founder of the Blocs plugin for Framer. I'm keen to share a bit of my journey with you as part of the Framer Plugins blog series.

What Does the Blocs Plugin Do?

Blocs is a drag-and-drop website builder designed for creative folks! We built Blocs for for people who love experimenting with new and bold ideas, but hate how long it takes to build them and make them responsive. Blocs is ideal for designers, developers, marketers, freelancers, agencies, and beginners.

A Little About Me

I've always been someone with a huge range of interests, and the thing that tied all those interests together was a love for creating things. I've been building websites for around 4 or 5 years now, and honestly I learned web design/development through pure grit. It wasn't something that came naturally to me - but I never gave up on a website because of how hyper-focused I was on the vision of what the website could be. We built Blocs to do all the tedious tasks for you, so that hopefully building a website never feels like pure grit and you can stay in the creative zone for way longer.

The Inspiration Behind Blocs

Before Blocs was a plugin, it was just a project file on Framer with a bunch of pre-built sections and components, and preset styles. Most of the ideas for the features of our plugin was just taking something like color styles from the project and just asking ourselves "how can I make adding and editing color styles 10x easier with a plugin?". Once we asked that question 100 times about 100 different things, we had a plugin.

Why We Decided to Build the Plugin

We were getting a bit of traffic and Blocs was doing pretty well on twitter when suddenly Koen (Framer's CEO) DM'd me and asked if we wanted to turn Blocs into a plugin. I thought it was a pretty awesome idea, so I showed Aidan (Blocs' co-founder) and he agreed, so we basically replied back with "yes pls." and started planning immediately.

Overcoming Challenges

While I'd love to say we knew what we were doing and it was a walk in the park, that'd be far from the truth. Honestly, time zones derailed us the most for sure. Time zone differences already make it difficult for Aidan and I to hop on calls with me being in Australia, and him in the UK, but when we got Isaac on board (absolute unit of a programmer) it spread us pretty thin with communication since he's based in the U.S.

This forced us to do all of our communication through text since it was so hard to jump on calls at a time that was fair for everyone. I personally struggled with this a lot because I can be pretty impatient and if I'm confused about something, it's so frustrating knowing if I ask a question in our Slack, I've gotta wait hours to hear back sometimes. Honestly though, I love being put in difficult positions like that though, because it taught me a lot about remote teamwork, and the importance of communication. As designers and non-technical founders, it's easy to over-scope ideas, and it's far from ideal having to wait a full day to be told something won't work so communication was key here.

We've had a lot of great feedback so far, and I'm really grateful because we put a lot of love into creating Blocs. We're working on it every day, and I can't wait to share more about what we're building next.

Read more stories from other creators behind Framer plugins!