Hello, my name is Christy Rae and in these lessons I will show you how to use page builders to create complex layouts for your WordPress website. We're going to start off by answering the question, what is a page builder? And to do that we need to look at a few different ways that you can create pages in WordPress. So right now the default way to create a page in WordPress is using the block editor, which is what I've got on my screen right now. And with the block editor you can use a series of blocks to create rows, columns, you can add images, buttons, text, and everything else. The only potential problem with this is that when you're looking at the block editor you're not seeing the entire site. So you can see here this is the image at the top of the page but above that I just see the name of the page, it just says home. And I don't see the menu, I don't see the logo or anything like that. And when I go to the bottom of the page then I don't see the footer. So I can't see the page within the context of the entire site. So the other problem is that any styles that are added in the customizer, they don't necessarily reflect what's on the block editor. So I don't get to see everything within that context. And I don't really get to see what it would look like to a user on the front end of the site. So some developers don't like working with the block editor for those reasons. But a lot of times the block editor can create really any type of complex layout that you want, it's just some people prefer to use a more visual method for editing the site and be able to see everything within the context of the entire page. Now a newer way of working with your pages in WordPress is using the full site editor. And this is also known as a site editor. I've got that open right now for my one of my WordPress sites. And the site editor allows you to modify templates. So you can see I can modify a single template, a page, an index. It also lets you modify your template parts like the header, the sidebar, and the footer. And it lets you see when you edit a page, it lets you actually see that page within the context of the entire site. And so when you're adding blocks, you're adding it to that template. And you'll be able to see what it looks like with the header like this for the for example, and also the footer which looks like this on this particular site. So it's a little bit closer to a full site editor. It's called a full site editor, but some people would rather have a more visual editor. So it's a little bit easier to see everything within the context of the website. And that's where the page builders come in. So there are many, many page builders out there. If you do a search for page builder in the free WordPress plugin repository, you'll see that you get over a thousand results. And you can see that some of those are for block page builders and using full site editing, the the site editor that we looked at earlier. And some of them are basically replacements for that full site editor. They're going to be a page builder that allows you to edit what is on the front end of the website. And so you can see when you edit the page, you're editing it with the menu there, the footer, and the actual content for the page visible on the screen while you're doing the editing. And some examples of those would be SeedProd, the website builder by SeedProd, page builder by SiteOrigin, and many, many others. A really popular one is Elementor, which we will take a look at in just a little bit, but there are a lot of page builders out there. And the page builders are going to be in some cases plugins, and in other cases they will be themes. So if you look in the themes repository, you might find some additional page builders in there as well. Now the page builders are going to be a variety of different license methods or license options. You've got everything from completely free up through premium. So you've got some freemium where they will give you a free version with the hopes that you'll upgrade to a pro version, and there are some that are only available in a premium model. So let's take a look at a few of them. I'm just going to run through some of the some of the more popular ones real quick, and you'll see just a few options that you've got there. So the first one is Beaver Builder, and Beaver Builder is available as a freemium plugin. You can install it from the WordPress plugin repository, or you can upgrade. And one of the nice things about Beaver Builder is that it does have a theme that's available with one of the levels, so it's not available with their least expensive, their standard level, but it is available with their pro levels. So that's that's one of the nice things. You can have a theme that works specifically with that particular plugin. Another builder that we've got out there is called Bricks. Bricks Builder basically gives you the full site editing and allows you to edit templates like the header, the footer, the search results, and things like that. So it's very similar to the full site editor that's built into WordPress, but it's using the visual editor called Bricks, and Bricks is actually a theme. Another builder that we've got is Divi, and Divi is available as a theme and a plugin, so either one depending on which one you want to use. It is a premium page builder, so you do have to pay in order to use it. Another one that's freemium is Elementor, and it's pretty widely used. It's very, very popular in the WordPress plugin repository, and they do have a free theme called Hello Elementor that you can install to use with this particular plugin. And then finally, another option that we have here is Oxygen. It's a popular page builder, and it's another one that you can install, but this one is a premium page builder, so you have to pay for it. So when it comes to deciding which page builder you want to use for your site, there are a few factors that you need to consider, and one of them is going to be ease of use. So I do want you to go through and try out some of these plugins and some of these themes and see which one is the easiest for you to use. That's going to be easiest for the free ones or the freemium ones, so you can try them out before you buy them. Another factor is going to be the cost. So you can see, for example, if you're using Beaver Builder and you're using it on multiple websites, you need to pay $199. If you're using Elementor, we look at the pricing for that for the page builder plugin. The pro version is, for one website, is $59 a year, for three is $99. You can get 25 websites for the pro for $199, so you do need to think about what the cost is for the builder. Another thing to consider is the number of features or the actual features that are available and what kind of extensions are available for it. So you really want to take a look at them and look through what add -ons are available, if the features that you want are all there, and really do a good thorough review of each of the different builders. And then another thing that I think is pretty important is how optimized is the output that these builders create. So one of the potential problems with using a page builder is that sometimes the code that it creates, if you're using, for example, Beaver Builder to create your page, so if we're using the page builder, then the code that it creates could be a little bit more than what you would get if you were to use programming to create a similar layout. So if you were to actually go in to the PHP code, the HTML code, and create the layout yourself, using something like a page builder, it could make the code a little bit larger, a little bit more complex, which could slow down your page. So you really want to look at the different builders and see which ones create optimized code. So you need to do a little bit of research, and you can see this one claims to be developer -friendly with clean code, so that is something to do a little bit of research into and make sure that the page that it creates is not going to slow down your website. So really the best way to do that is to install some of the different plugins or some of the different page builders and create the same page using each of the different page builders and then compare them to see which one is fastest, which one downloads the fastest. So there are some things that you can do with that. So there are a lot of things to consider. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to use Beaver Builder to create a complex page layout.
