What Changed in the BLOC Architecture Site Rebuild | APX Digital

What actually changed in the BLOC Architecture rebuild, and why an architect's site has to sell the studio

BLOC Architecture designs homes for a living. Their old website did the opposite of their buildings: it had no structure you could read. This is the case study version of the rebuild: what we measured before, what shipped on 27–28 August 2026, and the one bug we caught after launch.

Alan runs a residential architecture practice covering planning permission, building regulations and technical drawings for UK homeowners and small developers. For a practice like that, the website is not a brochure. A homeowner comparing three studios at their kitchen table will not read your fee proposal before they've seen your work, so the site is the first built thing they tour. If it feels like a template, the drawings suddenly have to work harder to prove themselves.

The before, documented

We screenshotted every page of the old site on 27 August 2026 before touching anything (the four captures sit in the project folder, the largest a 4.5 MB PNG). What they show: a single-page site with one navigation item, a "Home" dropdown, on a flat charcoal background. No services breakdown, no project pages, no process. The tagline carried the message; the page structure carried nothing.

We keep a code snapshot of the rebuilt front end: 1,250 lines of index.html, dated 27 August 2026 in the project folder, structured into services, portfolio, process, reviews and contact sections with reduced-motion support baked in. That section list is the actual strategy: a homeowner's questions in the order they ask them.

The after, as measured on 3 September 2026

Three schemes went up as proper project pages: 1 Shelly Lane, Ulverley Crescent and Land at Yew Tree Lane, each pairing proposed drawings with a downloadable materials schedule. That is the difference between "we do architecture" and "here is exactly what we hand a client." A local developer can audit the deliverable before ringing.

The site itself sits on our Light retainer at £35/month, which includes one hour a month; blog posts and content updates come out of that, at £45/hr beyond it. The rebuild is a one-off project; the site is not finished, it's maintained.

What we got wrong, honestly

Post-launch checks on 3 September 2026 found two things. First, www.blocarc.co.uk does not resolve at all; only the bare domain works, which is a DNS decision we'd rather fix than explain. Second, and worse for a studio that lives on visuals: the `og:image` meta tag points at `https://www.blocarc.co.uk/og-residential-development.webp`, a URL on the subdomain that doesn't exist. The image is served fine from the bare domain (measured 195,878 bytes); shared links just preview without it. One DNS record and one meta tag fix it. We flag it because "before/after" posts that only show after are adverts.

We deliberately don't quote a Lighthouse score in this case study, because we didn't run one this week, and half the numbers floating around the web are stale anyway. Everything above is either measured from files on disk or fetched from the live site with curl on 3 September 2026. The image weight work behind those project pages gets its own breakdown: WebP done properly: the image pipeline behind BLOC's rebuild. If you're deciding what a site should cost rather than what it should contain, read template site vs bespoke build: an honest £550 vs £1,997 breakdown.

Why this sells the studio

The rebuild changed three things that actually matter to a homeowner: proof (real schemes with real deliverables), structure (the site answers questions in order), and being findable (title, copy and analytics aimed at "residential architects UK" rather than a brand name nobody searches). Practice-level design decisions, such as material honesty, load order and what you show first, were already in the drawings. The site just stopped getting in their way.

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Need your practice site to sell the practice? APX builds and maintains fixed-price sites from £550, with the BLOC-style build sitting in our website service. Email Info@apxdigital.io or call 07753 226214.