However, it looks and functions terribly - we would like to totally revamp it without doing any custom design / coding.
We want to either use Ghost or a 2nd Webflow template. What is the best way to achieve this without having to have this on a subdomain? We have to keep it on A Blog For Passionate Business Owners | Baluu to maintain our SEO.
Honestly, if you want your blog to look completely different, I’d recommend that you rebuild your entire site for consistency. the main reason is that many themes have different navigation paradigms, so it would be difficult for users as they switch from one part of the site to another.
The sense of consistency and the general UX would likely suffer. Physically it’s possible- just buy the template you want, and copy the design elements over you’d like for your blog. However in Webflow, the class name collisions could be a bit of a headache to deal with. I’d vote for consistency.
Two other options, both of which involve at least as much work;
Split out your blog to a separate site on a subdomain. Add 301 redirects throughout so your SEO remains intact.
Setup a proxy, so that /blog actually goes to a physically separate Webflow site. The domain would be the same, from the user’s perspective, but the site, CMS, and design would be distinct. You’d have to figure out how to keep nav consistent.
Splitting out the blog to separate site is not an option for us, however setting up a proxy would. Can you explain the process of setting up the routing like this inside the webflow platform? I didn’t think you could access this kind of routing.
It’s not much different from other reverse proxy setups, but I have not configured a reverse proxy setup for Webflow yet. You’ll find some posts here- I understand there is a bit of awkwardness getting the settings right to work with Webflow hosting, particularly with Cloudflare.
It’s important for you to understand what you’re building here.
You’d be running, and hosting two sites. Two hosting fees. Two different template designs. You’d migrate your blog content ( or your main site content ) to the second site, since it will use the new template you want. Then you’d setup reverse proxy so that the two sites behave as one.
/* → Site A Main /blog/* → Site B Blog
There’s a lot of work there, not just building the new site, but the reverse proxy setup, and making a cohesive navigation.
Here are a few posts & articles to get you started.