Web Design Tools for WordPress

The Framework

To get your car moving, you need a chassis or framework. In WordPress terms, a framework is a special "parent theme" or "super theme" that sits on top of WordPress and provides the functionality required to make WordPress go! For this I use the Genesis Framework from StudioPress.

The Child Theme

Great, your Web site now has power, wheels and seats, but it looks really boring! So now you need a child theme. This is how you add the beautiful paint job and all those little details that make your car or Web site reflect your business or personality. There are several options for this:

1. a free off-the-shelf child theme
2. a paid off-the-shelf child theme
3. a custom child theme from a designer/developer
4. a custom child theme you make yourself.

Want Control Over Your Child Theme? Here Are Some Options...

1. Buy a really cool child theme from StudioPress and customize it using a plugin from CobaltApps called Genesis Extender.
2. Another tool you might consider is Genesis Design Palette Pro. You can use it to customize the Genesis Framework itself or one of many StudioPress beautiful child themes.
3. Or, for a 100% unique child theme, use a tool called Dynamik Website Builder which enables you to build a fully customized Genesis child theme yourself.

I use Dynamik Website Builder (with the Genesis Framework, of course) for myself and most of my clients. I got seriously annoyed using third-party child themes because they never did exactly what I wanted them to. I always ended up tweaking them endlessly, so I figured out I might as well just start from scratch! I am much happier now. 🙂

Want to Delve a Little Deeper into My Toolbox?

Here are some more tools that can significantly change how fast and how easily you can customize your WordPress Web site without knowing a lick of CSS, HTML or PHP...

The Visual Page/Content Builder

It's a lot of work and effort trying to find (and use!) good plugins to do all the fancy stuff everyone expects these days: columns (you can't use tables in a responsive WordPress site!), slideshows, lightboxes, call-to-action boxes, call-outs, buttons, contact forms, full-width background images (oh boy, those are really popular right now!), parallax, social media buttons, testimonials, etc. Many of these plugins add shortcodes to your pages/posts... and things can get really messy, really hairy, really fast.

But, now your pages and posts can look fabulous without having to find separate plugins for all those features (and no messing with shortcodes, either!). Plus, you can reduce the amount of time and technical skill it takes to build the most beautiful custom pages imaginable (a fancy home page, custom post types, sales/landing pages, galleries, about us, contact us, product pages, etc.).

How can you accomplish all this? By using a visual page builder plugin such as Visual Composer, Thrive Content Builder or WP Beaver Builder. Look at each one closely and test drive them before you decide which one to buy. While they are quite similar in concept, they are not the same in execution, design and usability. I use Beaver Builder for a lot of reasons, one of them being the enthusiasm and responsiveness of their development team. Awesome tool!

The Visual CSS Editor

Tweaking the CSS can be really tricky in WordPress. It's often very hard, even using FireFox's FireBug or Chrome's Code Inspector, to discern what CSS selector you need to edit to change a certain element: font, heading, button, menu, etc.

But, hold the phone, here come Microthemer and CSS Hero to the rescue. These are visual CSS editors that can locate that specific selector and enable you to add custom styles without any knowledge of CSS at all. These tools are miracle workers, trust me! I use Microthemer.