Working with revise chemistry with Mr B
I've had the opportunity to work with Revise Chemistry with Mr B recently, I've know Mr B for a good while now, he has been a chemistry teacher for over 25 years and at the end of last year, when we were catching up after a while he showed me his personal project: He created a youtube channel to help students understand chemistry and prepare for their exams, I found this idea fascinating in many levels.
Just to start with, Mr B didn't have any previous experience doing videos for youtube, and he didn't have any experience building websites, however, he was so committed to his goal that he decided to teach himself how to do it. He created his own personal website using a platform called IONOS, and started uploading a lot of great content to youtube and TikTok with the aim of helping students.
He had learned so much about this new world when we caught up and was very passionate about it, the motivation was certainly contagious and prompted me to offer my help with the area I know the most, his website.
Mr B wanted to be able to improve his website and optimise it for SEO, he also wanted to be able to write Blog Posts about his videos he could share with other companies that are interested in his content. I decided to see what he had so far and help improve it, making this particular website as a test for his! We wanted to be able to have the blog capabilities by end of January and we explored different options and decided to improve what we already had on IONOS.
Working with IONOS
Given Mr B had already acquired his domain with IONOS we decided to go ahead with this option and see how much we could do with their website editor. It worked incredibly well for what we wanted to do, however it had a lot of limitations:
- You are really constrained by the template you choose, there is little room to move elements within said template, and you need to learn to work within those constrains
- Creating a blog is a manual process in many ways, there is no option for the website builder to understand a page can have child pages that then you want to display in the landing page
- We couldn't find a way to paginate the posts which means that when the page grows to a certain point we will need to find a different solution
- There is also no option to add a search functionality for the blog posts on the site
- The performance isn't the best, it doesn't add any image optimisation and response times aren't great
- If you are adding youtube videos like we did, it has no option to add titles for them or anything, you can only put a link
- You can't set a base colour scheme or fonts for the template, and you have to manually make sure they are all consistent
Other than the above you are able to quickly spin up a website very quickly and it covers some basics for SEO: You can add an SEO title and meta Description for your content, it creates a sitemap out of the box which is really handy and you don't need to worry at all about maintaining the code or deploying it to a production environment.
Conclusion
I've learned a lot from working with Revised Chemistry with Mr B, as a Software Engineer I've never entertained the idea of using a Web Site builder like IONOS to build a website, but is very interesting to see how it works and what it can do. It can be a bit frustrating given the limitations mentioned before, but it gets the job done really quickly.
We are looking forwards to build a personalised website without the constrains we found with IONOS but for now Mr B is going to be able to write some very interesting Blog Posts to keep helping students with Chemistry!
You can visit Mr B's website following this link: https://www.revisechemistrywithmrb.co.uk/
Please also make sure to check his youtube channel and TikTok account!