When it comes to technical challenges, I’ve always been a D.Y.I. guy. (Not so much around the house, however.)
I know that I should find ways to outsource some of the more mundane tasks of running my online activities. But the truth is that I find a certain satisfaction in figuring things out—and to be honest, I have a hard time relinquishing control.
This often means that things take longer, and the results aren’t as good as an outsourced professional might achieve.
Well, that was true—until I started to use Thrive Products to design websites for myself, as well as for my clients. Not only do I get beautiful results, but it’s kind of fun, too.
It starts with the Themes. It’s the difference between starting with a blank page versus a nice-looking, highly optimized template. Of course, I do a lot customization with colors, fonts, graphics, and functional elements. But the structure is already in place, and that’s a HUGE head start when designing a site.
There are ten themes to start with, and dozens of templates for individual pages with specific functions. For example, homepages, landing pages, thank you pages, and pages dedicated to precise goals like opting in to a webinar or subscribing to a podcast.
Thrive also provides a tool called “Clever Widgets” which helps you customize the readers’ experience to get the most relevant content in front of them. For example, if you have multiple opt-in offers, you can choose which one is displayed on any given page based on category or tags or several other metrics.
Thrive Leads is a feature that allows you to integrate lead generating forms onto your site and it works seamlessly with your email service provider, such as Aweber or MailChimp.
But of course the feature that is the most useful is the visual editor. For people who are intimidated by html code, or even the default WordPress editor, this tool makes everything as easy as “what you see is what you get.” Anybody can do it, even absolute beginners. There’s a learning curve of about 45 minutes, and then you’re off and running.
New Thrive Headline Feature
This newest plugin gives users the easiest and most powerful tool for testing and improving the effectiveness of headlines in their blog posts by making them more compelling and click-worthy.
Think about how much of a craze for “content marketing” there is in the online marketing space right now. The Thrive Headline Optimizer plugin perfectly taps into this trend, because A/B testing and improving headlines is the number one greatest point of leverage for improving your content marketing.
I’ve already been playing with this new feature, and I’ve got to say that it’s really fun. Like a game almost, sometimes with surprising results. Anything I can do to improve click through rate is going to positively affect everything from traffic to ranking to conversions.
Why I use Thrive Products to Design Websites
Simply put, the products offered by Thrive make all the important tasks easier. More importantly, they’re designed to work. No struggling or guessing or wasting time on unproductive strategies.
The results are clean, responsive sites that are easy to update. One problem that I have with custom-designed sites created by highly skilled professionals is that you need to continue to hire the highly skilled (and highly paid) professionals to maintain the site and make even the smallest changes. Then when WordPress updates their platform, the chances are that your site will have to be updated too.
And in case you’re wondering, yes, this site was 100% designed by me—a person with ZERO design skills or experience—using only Thrive products.
