WordPress has evolved from being just a simple blogging application to a tool that can be used to design all types of pages – marketing pages, product showcase pages, business pages, etc.
Whatever you can think of, someone is most likely already building it with WordPress!
This article will help you discover the fastest way to create stunning page layouts in WordPress web sites.
Drag And Drop Content Editors For WordPress
Is The WordPress Editor Still Meeting All Of Your Content Creation And Editing Needs?
With all the many advancements that the WordPress platform has undergone in recent years, many WordPress users feel that using the built-in WordPress visual content editor to build or edit more complex page elements can be challenging.
(The WordPress editor is great for adding, formatting and editing “linear” text and media, but adding more complex content elements can be quite challenging!)
For example, let’s say you want to create something like the layout shown below …
To create the above boxes with text and buttons, you would normally have to insert shortcodes into your content for each element you want to create …
Normally, this is not an issue … until you decide to reconfigure the layout (for example, move some of the content from box 3 into box 2, or replace the background color inside a box from dark green to gold. Then, you’re stuck having to mess around with page code or html.
The WordPress content editor is supposed to provide users with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, but as you can see, when creating with complex content elements, what you see is not what you are going to get when your content goes live …
(“What You See” isn’t always “What You Get” … unless you can visualize code!)
In some instances, you may even be better off working with the html source itself instead of the WordPress WYSIWYG editor when trying to create non-linear layouts …
Even though WordPress is extremely easy to use, this makes it hard for non-technical users to fully manage their own content.
The fundamental issue of using shortcodes and HTML to create content in the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor can be summarized as follows:
1) Speed – How long will it take to build a web page using the editor?
2) Abstraction – How closely does the content in the editor resemble the “front end” content when you are creating or editing a page?
As you can see from the above screenshot, what you see in the back end doesn’t look at all like what you see in the front end. This means that you have to abstract what your content will look like when working with sophisticated layouts. Other solutions require taking a number of steps before you can start configuring your page layout, or endlessly going back and forth between browser tabs and performing updates to see how your content is coming along, which then affects how quickly you can create your content, as you wait for the content to load.
A number of WordPress web developers have come up with different solutions with the aim of making content editing more intuitive. Some of these range from standalone plugins you can install on your site that add new functionality to the editor, to themes that offer built-in features like drag and drop editing …
(WordPress “drag and drop” editors aim to make creating complex layouts easier!)
Some solutions require so many page-building features, that users end up with complicated-looking front end editors …
Many of these alternative solutions work, but they still don’t address the fundamental issue of using HTML and shortcodes as described earlier. Creating, adding and editing non-linear content on a web page becomes overly complicated, involves multiple steps and doesn’t match what users expect to see on the “front end.”
If you want your page content to look ”perfect” quickly, this can become very frustrating after a while.
Ask yourself this …
If there were no technical constraints, how would you like your page builder to work?
Now that you’ve asked this question, visualize the following scenario …
- You look at your content and if you see something that needs fixing, simply click on the content and start changing it. Your content has been instantly fixed.
- You can just drag and drop items on the page, and see them exactly as they will appear on the front end without having to mentally translate code.
- You have an idea for a specific item of content that you would like to add, so you immediately begin typing, and you build your web page as you go, without delays, with no tab switching, and without having to wait for web pages to reload.
Would this not be the perfect way to create content for your web site? Just click-to-edit and drag and drop elements around the page?
(Imagine being able to create complex page layouts quickly for your web content without technical constraints!)
If you are ready to change the way you create content in WordPress site, then here is a plugin that you may want to consider using …
Thrive Content And Landing Page Builder – WordPress Click-To-Edit Drag & Drop Content And Page Builder
Plugin Description
Thrive Content Builder is a ground-breaking WordPress plugin that gives you total control over every aspect of your web page design using a true WYSIWYG click-to-edit and drag and drop content editor.
The Thrive Content Builder plugin provides WordPress users with a new and incredibly easy way to speed up the process of creating great content on.
Once installed, the plugin adds a visual content editor and a menu that lets you drag and drop design elements on your page …
(Thrive Content Builder adds a new content editor to WordPress)
Thrive Landing Pages And Content Builder is actually a combination of the Thrive Content Builder and Thrive Landing Pages plugins combined into one, plus an additional plugin feature called Thrive Lightbox.
Let’s examine each of the above plugins and how these features work seamlessly together to help you transform and improve your site and create awesome sales pages, streamlined landing pages and engaging content.
Thrive Content Builder – Click-To-Edit Drag & Drop Content Creator For WordPress
With the Thrive Content Builder plugin, you can easily build complex web page design layouts using drag and drop elements …
Every aspect of your page can be built using simple “drag and drop” and “click-to-edit” …
Once elements have been added to the page, you can then easily edit these without having to go through additional steps or opening new settings screens …
You can also work inside beautiful landing pages that can just as easily be edited or customized …
Thrive Content and Page Builder is simple, easy to use, and ideal for all WordPress users at all levels. In fact, working on content with Thrive Landing Pages and Content Builder installed is so amazingly simple, that the developers warn that once you start using it, you’ll never look back!
For more details about this plugin go here: Thrive Content Builder
Thrive Content Builder and Thrive Landing Pages were created by the same team that developed Thrive Leads, another great plugin for WordPress that we have previously written about on this site.
See this post to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Thrive Content Builder to speed up the process of designing pages and creating content for your website:
Easy, Quick & Simple To Install
Thrive Content Builder is really easy to install. Just upload a zip file that contains the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Edit Content In Real Time
Thrive Content Builder is simple and intuitive to use and lets you create and edit content in real-time.
What You See Is Exactly What You Get
With Thrive Content Builder installed, what you see as you work within the content editor – fonts, elements, layouts, etc. is exactly what you get in the front end of your site.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Add Beautiful Page Layouts With Drag And Drop Ease: Create any layout you can imagine with drag and drop ease.
- Add Design Elements Without Shortcodes: With Thrive Content Builder you not only get an amazing click-to-edit content builder, but the plugin also includes a very decent collection of functional and attractive web design elements that you can use on your web pages without using short codes, like flat design elements, star ratings for review pages, testimonials, responsive videos, etc.
- Distraction-Free Content Creation: Not having to wait for the page to reload frees up your attention and allows you to be more focused while you build content or click through multiple layers of menus to get what you need done.
(Thrive Content Builder lets you easily add, edit and customize page elements like testimonial boxes, tabbed content, feature grids, buttons, responsive maps, etc.)
Features
Thrive Content Builder offers site owners a number of great features. Below we have listed just some of these features:
- All WordPress Editor Functionality Is Preserved: You have all of the built-in content editing options that you are used to (e.g. bold, paragraph centering, headings, etc.),
- Drag And Drop Multi-Style Elements: The plugin makes a “drag and drop” list of elements available on your post or page screen for editing content.
- Conversion-Boosting Elements: The plugin includes a range of eye-catching and customizable elements that will help you increase the effectiveness of your sales pages, including buttons and call-to-action elements, testimonials, and guarantee forms. In addition to customization options, multiple design options are also available for various elements.
- Responsive Element Design: Add responsive columns, text boxes, content section dividers, e.g. which will display correctly on devices with differently sized screens.
- Add Animation Events To Pages: The Event Manager feature lets you add animated page content, trigger lightboxes and more!
(Add Animated Elements To Your Web Pages)
Thrive Landing Pages – Landing Page Template Sets
Landing page sets are templates that work together logically and use the same conversion-optimized design language to take your visitors from signup to purchase, product download and more.
(Thrive Landing Pages lets you add conversion-optimized web pages to your web site)
Thrive Landing Pages – Benefits
- Everything is hosted on your own WordPress site
- Save time building beautiful-looking pages
- 100% conversion-optimized web page templates
- No tech skills required
- Works with any theme
Thrive Content Builder and Landing Pages not only can be used to create beautiful-looking content in your WordPress posts and pages, but you can also choose from dozens of professionally designed, conversion optimized web page templates and fully customizable …
(Thrive Landing Pages provides sets of templates that work together logically and use the same conversion-optimized design language)
There are over 30 templates available, with more templates planned for future release. In addition to the templates that are currently available, expect to see new templates in the future for email lead generation, sales pages, training pages, personal branding pages, webinar pages and more.
Completely Customizable And Flexible Landing Page Template
Typically, in order to fully customize landing page templates, you would need to either pay a web designer to do the work, or learn web coding languages like HTML and CSS and figure out what to do yourself.
As Shane Melaugh, co-founder of Thrive Themes says …
“There are many ways to get a pre-designed page published quickly, but the problem comes with customization. Total design freedom requires either hiring web developers to do the work for you, or learn how to do it yourself, which involves learning how to mess around with code or use complicated editors. Customizable usually means complicated, expensive or time-consuming. So, you can either have something that is fast and easy to set up, or something that is customizable and flexible. But you couldn’t have both … until now! With Thrive Landing Pages you get the best of both worlds for creating conversion-optimized web pages.”
Thrive Landing Pages gives you great-looking pre-built pages that are fully optimized and ready to go, and complete design freedom that allows you to change or customize any aspect of the page templates …
The landing page templates included with this plugin let you do the following:
- Change text in any bullet point, headline, button, etc.
- Delete text, images or any other part of the landing page
- Change the background image and background colors
- Edit the color of text, buttons, links, etc.
- Choose your own fonts
- Select your own images and graphics
- Edit the size of the content area
- Rearrange the order of elements on the pages
- Translate pages into different languages
- Add custom content inside any of the pages
- Use pre-designed, customized pages, or create your own from scratch and save them as new page templates.
(Change or edit any element of your page templates)
Transform Your Web Site Into A Marketing Machine With Thrive Lightbox
The Thrive plugin combo includes the Thrive Lightbox plugin, which lets you add fully editable two-step opt-in forms and events to your web pages …
(Add opt-in forms and animation to your web pages with the Thrive Lightbox plugin)
2-Step Opt-in Forms
A two-step opt-in process can help improve your conversion rates. When visitors click on an image or button they are presented with your opt-in form …
(Capture more leads and subscribers with a two-step opt-in process)
Thrive Lightbox Event Manager
An “event” consists of a trigger and an action. You can make opt-in forms appear when when visitors click or hover their mouse over a button or an image, or when someone scrolls down to a certain point on the page. You can also use the Event Manager to animate attention-getting elements on your pages, using various effects (e.g. zoom in from the page center, slide in from top to bottom, roll in, etc.
(Set up and manage events on your pages with Thrive Lightbox)
A lightbox and event is created automatically for your landing pages, but you also have complete control over the events, triggers and design.
Testimonials
Below are just a few of the testimonials and feedback that plugin customers have published about the Thrive Content Builder plugin:
”Wow! This is just getting better & better. This plugin is making my websites look so professional. Keep up the great work and thank you for the new features. Ladonna Ragalin”
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”Your stuff is beautifully designed, fast and has great options for marketers that you just don’t see with other themes. Great, great job! Absolutely love Thrive! David Coleman”
Thrive Content Builder – Tips
Thrive Content Builder works with any WordPress theme, not just with the Thrive Landing Pages plugin. Note, however, that you cannot use Thrive Content Builder to edit content on existing pages or posts that were not created using the plugin.
You can add shortcodes inside Thrive Content Builder or Thrive Landing Pages and they will be displayed correctly on on your web site.
Thrive Lightbox works with any content you build using Thrive Content Builder.
Thrive Content Builder Support
Thrive Content Builder and Landing Pages Plugin provides free updates, new landing pages and upcoming features. The plugin developers are constantly working on adding new features and improving existing ones.
Thrive products are really well-supported, and users get unlimited software updates, and one year unlimited support with their purchase, backed by a no-risk, thirty day, full money-back guarantee.
This is an exciting product for WordPress users that will just keep getting better.
Product Cost
At the time of writing, the pricing information shown below includes all three components described above (Thrive Content Builder, Thrive Landing Pages & Thrive Lightbox):
- Single Site Edition – This allows you to run the plugin on a single domain. Price includes full feature set, unlimited updates and 1 year of unlimited support. Price = $59.00.
- Unlimited Sites License – This edition enables you to run the plugin on all web sites that you own. Cost includes full feature set, unlimited updates and 1 year of unlimited support. Cost = $87.00.
- Agency License – Use on all your websites & on all your client domains. Includes access to Thrive Content Builder, plus all Thrive Themes & Thrive Plugins. Cost = $247.00 per year.
Please Note: Price details for this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the plugin developer when you visit the site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the current price:
Additional Info
The Thrive Content and Page Builder plugin developers emphatically assert that the plugin’s architecture gives you the “best of both worlds,” and help bring back the “joy of creating content.”
On the one hand, you have time-saving features like ready-made web page elements and conversion-optimized template sets that help to speed up content design, and on the other hand, you also have complete control over your design process and the freedom to change and customize anything and everything on your web page, using the plugin’s visual content editor, which allows you to get things done without having to keep switching tabs or going through multiple steps.
For a demo video of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Thrive Content Builder website.
We Recommend …
If you want to edit something, you click on the element and start editing. If you want to change something, do it, and you’ll see the change happen immediately. If you want to move something, you drag it and drop it into its new position. There are no complicated steps involved.
If you want to transform and improve your business online and create amazing marketing pages and content, this plugin delivers an incredible conversion-boosting package with a single, inexpensive plugin.
For more details, check out the plugin here:
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