Why Use Drag And Drop Builders On Your Site?
Why Use Drag And Drop Builders On Your Site?
One of the questions I get all the time is "Why is my site so ugly". This is easily remedied by using a nice theme. However, drag and drop builders help to add that additional pizzaz most are looking for.
WordPress Themes
Word press comes with themes but once you get to building your site you are going to want to move to a nicer theme. Wealthy Affiliate has a bunches of different themes to choose from and they will add that little added spark to your site.
This is great, however, many will get frustrated when they start to build a page and can't get the look they want. How many times have you wanted more than one column on your page or you want an image on the left and text on the right. How about the countdown timer, additional space be tween sections, or the video to the right and bullet points with fancy check boxes to the left.
Yes, these are all common wants and if your theme comes with a drag n drop builder like cornerstone, or elementor you will have more options to build fancy pages. But most themes don't come with a drag and drop builder and for that you will need a plugin.
WordPress Plugins
Most of these builders come in the form of a plugin that is added as part of your theme. You can also purchase many of these plugins and just add them to your site and use the theme you have.
My personal favorites are Optimize Press, Cornerstone, and Elementor. All of these allow the drag and drop builders.
Drag and Drop Builders
(Image from Optimize Press Plugin)
When you use a premium drag and drop builder they will offer you page options that you can start with then tweak to your hearts content. The image above is the new page builder screen in Optimize Press.
But the real power comes in the ability to add elements to your site.
Elements are little pieces of code that can be added using drag and drop and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors.
This is where you can add many kinds of elements to your page that give it that extra pizzaz that I was talking about earlier.
(Elements in Optimize Press)
As you can see in the image above this is a small sample of different elements you can add. Here are some additional elements that drag and drop builders let you add.
- 2 column text
- Affiliate Page Snippets
- Arrows
- Audio Players
- Bullet Blocks
- Buttons
- Calendars
- Content Toggles
- Countdown Timers
- Course Description Blocks
- Custom HTML
- Dividers
- Dynamic Dates
- Facebook Comments
- Feature Blocks
- File Downloads
- Formatted Headlines
- Special Image Features
- Javascript
- Navigation
- Opt-in Boxes
- Pricing Grapics
- Progress Bars
- Q&A Elements
- Social Sharing Features
- Tabs
- Testimonials
- Vertical Spacing
- Video Players
This is just a small sample and you can see there are a bunches of nice features that can be added to your pages using drag n drop builders.
Tying Up The Loose Ends
As you can see using a drag and drop builder will take your site to the next level. This is how many of the top marketers get those really nice pages that you drool over.
If you have any questions about Drag and Drop Builders or just have something to add put it in the comments below. If you found this post to be informative and you think others should see it then click the like button.
Till Next Time...
- Glen B
Recent Comments
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Thanks for the information. I have paid for the pro version of my theme (Comley) and they supplied a zip file. I was unable to install it so contacted the theme owners for help, It took them 10 days to install it into my WP account and it destroyed the formatting of my theme. There was obviously a problem with the pro theme.
I then got advice from WA help center, and they told me to install my latest back up, which I did. This unfortunately deleted my pro theme package! I have asked for it from the theme designers again but get no answers for about 3 weeks already!
My question: Do I need the pro theme or can I just use a drag and drop builder to change my free theme around?
Visual composer (WP Bakery) was added to my WP editor by the Theme people, but only the free version. Should I pay for the pro version of this?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Cheers
Hi Andrew,
I personally use OptimzePress. They have been around for quite some time and continually update their product. So it is always fresh and has fantastic added features.
https://www.optimizepress.com/
It's not the cheapest but the core package at $97.00 will do everything you need.
Just as a side note sometimes really good plugins require you to load them via FTP. That is because of limits on the size of a file you can load into Wordpress. It's not that difficult to do and there are many great help articles on WA about how to do that.
I don't remember if I had to do that with optimize but that's most likely what had to be done with your pro theme.
- Glen B
Andrea,
OptimizePress is designed specifically for Marketers. It has landing pages, squeeze pages. Many pre-built templates or you can build from scratch.
It is my editor of choice. My second is cornerstone.
- Glen B
This is great information Glen.
I am nearing the point of really trying to add some pizazz to my site, and this is exactly what I needed.
Thanks!
KyleAnn
Aloha Glen... Thanks for this post. Earlier I had asked Kyle if I could use a drag and drop builder on wa and I thought he said no? So now I am confused.
Being the novice that I am, perhaps I asked the wrong question.
Have you heard of Prostyler Thememaker?
Is it possible to use it on my websites I am building on WA?
Thanks
Ok so I did a quick search for your pro styler. I've never heard of this themebuilder but I do know the guy that is selling it is a Internet Marketer. So I think this is a product he created to make money.
I think that Kyle was referring to Wealthy Affiliate itself and not to your personal blogs.
So to help you understand. At Wealthy Affiliate we have our blog within this platform. We can't do any additional plugins to that.
We also have the ability to create our own blog sites using the SiteRubix Website Builder. We can add plugins and themes to this directly once it's been built. We do that in the admin section of our blog site.
These are known good site builders:
https://elementor.com/
https://theme.co/cornerstone/
https://www.optimizepress.com/
There are others as you have suggested but these are the ones that most people use.
I use the last one optimizepress because it's more marketing related. The others work basically the same.
Hope this helps,
- Glen B
Hi Gayleneve,
So this is the thing Wix is great as a website builder. But there will come a time when you need that little bit of extra flexibility. You will become frustrated because the platform won't let you do it.
Wordpress on the other had while it takes a bit to learn will give you much more flexibility. I have build sites that you would never think are Wordpress.
Yes I'm a developer so that's why I'm able to do that but I have also taught others who at first had great difficulties to build stellar sites.
The great thing about wordpress is that you can find the tools to make it do anything.
I would urge you to bite the bullet and dig in and learn Wordpress Better.
If you have a few dollars look at OptimizePress or Cornerstone. The editors are completely separate from the Wordpress Editor and once learned you can do amazing sites.
- Glen B
Thanks Glen...
Looking at cornerstone and am impressed...
But now totally confused 'cause when I go to find out how much it costs I get sent to some other site; either envato or something called "X" which makes no sense????
Can not enter envato 'cause do not know my password and they do not send one when I ask????
Sorry to bother you with this but I am trying to decide what is the way forward for a newbie like me. Wordpress seems way to difficult without something like cornerstone (about to convert to wix?)
Hi Francis,
I don't think that Wix is going to do the trick. When you use Wix you lose all the benefits of the Wealthy Affiliate Platform. The content creator, requesting comments and feedback.
This is the purchase page for cornerstone. It is on envato market.
https://codecanyon.net/checkout/46287768/create_account
You can always easily create a different email on gmail if you can't get your account password fixed.
- Glen B
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Hey Glen:
Could you say that the drag n drop builders are like the accumulation of plug-ins from yester-years gone by? Like all the best of plug-ins rolled into one? Not literally, yet able to do this & do that whereby it used to require a plug-in (plug-in after plug-in after plug-in) for those who did not want to mess with the code?
.
Elementor seems to be a fantastic product in that they allow us to use a free version that does things other WP page builders charge for. https://elementor.com/ Great way to play around & practice before making any commitments. Also, great way to catch up on the greatest & latest code.