Editor's Note:
We have moved away from using it in favor of Beaver Builder as our preferred page builder. In fact, we recommend a few page builders that would be great to look into!
PLUGIN: Visual Composer THEME IN VIDEO: Bridge Theme by QODE
Visual Composer is without a doubt one of my favorite plugins, AND it is a page builder that comes as a packaged deal with a lot of premium themes on themeforest. Literally every site I’ve built for the past year and a half has use the Visual Composer plugin. It isn’t perfect, but it is the best way right now to build custom pages on your website without going crazy.
If you’ve been around WordPress for four minutes you know what shortcodes are. Shortcodes are little snippets of WordPress and Plugin specific code that let you do nifty things. Shortcodes = Shortcuts but Visual Composer = Shortcuttier.
You see, visual composer takes your shortcodes and turns it into a layout that you can see visually, hence the name. So rather than having to build the shortcodes you basically click what you want and watch it show up before your eyes.
Now, Visual Composer doesn’t look user friendly right out of the box, but hey, you’re building a website. It’s pretty simple but building a custom site for you church still isn’t the same as just making a new blog post. It takes some work and diligence. I do this pretty regular and it took about 15 minutes to learn the basics of Visual Composer and I’m still finding neat nuances and more efficient ways to do things.
The video with this post doesn’t give a crazy long 40 min tutorial, but it does run through the basics of what Visual Composer it is and how to build a neat page with it. It doesn’t expand on all the capabilities, but it will whet your appetite for more!
Another upside to Visual Composer is that it is quickly becoming one of the WordPress standards for page builders. Why is that good you ask? Because WP standards get a lot of attention from developers. Not only are a lot of premium themes giving this awesome plugin to you when you purchase the theme, but tons of other plugin developers are creating add-ons to expand the functionality of what you can do with Visual Composer.
Hey guys! I am a church leadership and creative guy living in the Atlanta area with my awesome wife and two kiddos. I've worked on staff with a number of churches as well as traveled full time as a conference speaker. Now, I work full time at The Reach Company helping ministries and businesses tell their story and make an impact online.
Make Your Church Shine!
Our goal is to help church leaders and volunteers get the most out of their WordPress site. Join our mailing list to get all the new WordPress Tools & Tuts (and the occasional WordPress deal) right in your inbox!
