How To Create A Blog Post With Thrive Themes

In this article, we're going to show important aspects of how to create a website with Thrive Architect for WordPress users including a complete setup process guide.

If you are thinking of starting your own internet business, then the first step is to choose the right type of tools that work best for your sales funnel.

With the Thrive Architect examples, we show in this blog post how to take your business to the next level using a very intuitive, very fast, and efficient conversion-focused page builder.

Thrive Themes

Thrive Architect is a WordPress page builder from Thrive Themes, which is part of Thrive Suite.

As a tool specifically designed for businesses because of its marketing focus, Thrive Suite contains a whole host of plugins that are extremely efficient and sleek.

It is one of the best all-in-one marketing tools you can find for WordPress content.

With 100s of templates for landing pages, squeeze pages, webinars pages, and everything you need for your marketing needs, Thrive Themes gives a whole host of conversion-focused tools for your WordPress site.

In terms of affordability, Thrive Themes is the best marketing solution for your online business.

Most website builders charge a monthly fee whereas Thrive Themes charge either quarterly or annual fees which comes with considerable discounts.

Is Thrive Architect Plugin User Friendly or Not?

Pretty easy to use, but it comes with a relatively steep learning curve.

Considering the plethora of resources that Thrive Themes gives you, the learning curve is greater, but the advantage is that all the tools come under one umbrella, working perfectly integrated and seamlessly together.

That certainly is an enormous advantage that will save you trouble and hassles with compatibility issues, helping streamline and grow your business.

Before we get into the setup and web page creation, let's just consider for a moment the reasons why anyone thinking of having a presence online needs to have a professional website, with specialized features, that helps you to create optimized content for your target audience.

Having a Professional Website

For the purpose of this blog post, we're concentrating on building a website yourself, without having to hire a web designer, and by using the technology of WordPress.

Building a website yourself will likely take more time, but will give you more control and understanding over how to operate a website.

The best option for any new business needing a basic website when you have little or no technology experience is arguably to use a website builder.

It cuts out the complexity, allows you to edit your website without much trouble, and is generally reasonable with regard to cost.

Thrive Architect

Having a website builder is part of the 5 essential tools we've compiled.

It is a free PDF guide with simple guidelines and recommendations for the 5 most important tools you will need to build a professional website.

Those are paid tools, with the exception of WordPress.org which comes as part of WordPress hosting providers.

Read our review of the most affordable and cost-effective website hosting providers for WordPress.

As we mentioned in the website hosting blog post, it's highly recommended that you use paid tools and avoid cutting corners by using the so called free services as it will be much more beneficial for growing your online business.

WordPress Plugin

Thrive Architect is a prominent WordPress page builder plugin used by over 100,000 people across the globe.

It is an ecosystem of its own right inside your WordPress dashboard and it's placed in quite a unique position as a website builder.

Due to its plethora of funnel options, conversion-driven features, an impressive range of WordPress themes, Thrive Architect is a solid set of tested and proven conversion-focused content builder.

Thrive Architect is part of Thrive Suite which is a set of 10 visual editor tools that work seamlessly together to help you start and grow your online business.

Included in Thrive Suite:

• Thrive Architect
• Thrive Leads
• Clever Widgets
• Headline Optimizer
• Thrive Ultimatum
• Thrive Ovation
• Thrive Quiz Builder
• Thrive Apprentice
• Thrive Comments
• Thrive Optimize
• Thrive Theme Builder

Within Thrive Leads, Thrive Lightbox is probably the most important widget.

It's an opt-in form that pops up in your visitor's window when triggered.

Using the drag-and-drop builder, you're able to customize the Lightbox to pop-up to any scope.

Applications can vary from a video pop-up to a squeeze page!

It's a potent conversion-focused lead generation tool.

Thrive Theme Builder

For people who might not be familiar with Thrive Suite, there's a difference between Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme Builder.

Thrive Theme Builder works seamlessly together with the WordPress plugin Thrive Architect, but they are two distinct software tools that are part of the same ecosystem.

Thrive Architect is the drag-and-drop WordPress plugin that helps you create general pages and blog pages effortlessly, giving it a professional visual.

Essentially, it allows you to change headers, footers, sidebars as well as on-page content.

The theme builder is an actual WordPress theme that is installed like any other WordPress theme, and its interface is very similar to that of Thrive Architect.

For a complete beginner, the best way to go about starting a website/blog in WordPress is to start off by using a WordPress default theme such as Twenty Nineteen.

You start by creating the basic content framework using Thrive Architect, and then install Thrive Theme Builder for the optimization of your site.

That's an easier and simpler route to follow.

Shapeshift and Ommi

Thrive Theme Builder comes with two companion themes:

1. Shapeshift
2. Ommi.

Ommi is the newest release from Thrive Themes - and I heard there will be more to come.

The difference between the two companion themes is essentially on the skin.

Shapeshift has a more rectangular look, whereas the design language of Ommi is more rounded.

Some people may refer to Ommi as more friendly, or organic with a fresh design, but in terms of functionality, they are identical.

You can access a demo on how your website will look with Ommi by following the link below:

Ommi Theme Demo

Understanding Your Web Hosting cPanel and Your WordPress cPanel

Let's start by having an overview of what web hosting is and WordPress so that you fully understand what each tool is and how they work together.

Your hosting is basically the server or the platform on where your website is built on.

For the purpose of demonstration I'm using our hosting provider which is SiteGround.

Once you're inside your web hosting dashboard you'll see your hosted website, which techpreference.com in our case.

From there you will navigate to your site tools, which is still inside your hosting provider.

That is your cPanel for your website inside your server.

Inside the server cPanel you will have all the tools related to your website – all the very intricate geeky, behind the scenes, stuff that you can do.

In very rare instances you might need to use some of those tools to fix potential problems with your website (such as security).

From the hosting cPanel you will access your WordPress cPanel.

Your WordPress cPanel is where you edit what appears on your website. That's basically pages, text, videos, information, etc., and all the stuff you will upload to your site.

Installing Thrive Suite on Your WordPress cPanel

Installing Thrive Suite is pretty simple and straightforward.

The first thing you need to go to is your membership dashboard where you're going to be greeted by another screen where it says "Access Your Products".

Then you click on "Thrive Product Manager Plugin" and download the plugin.

Login to the cPanel of your WordPress, go to plugins and click on "add new".

Select upload plugin on the top left-hand corner.

Simply drag and drop the file, or upload from your computer and click on install.

When the file is installed click on "activate plugin".

You will see that the Product Manager appears on your WordPress cPanel.

Next up you log into your account…

And there you are. The whole suite is ready to be installed on your WordPress.

At first, it is highly recommended that you install only Thrive Architect to edit the content of your website first.

When you have some content (pages and blog posts), then it is a good idea to install Thrive Theme Builder to optimize your content.

Of course, you can install both at the same time, but it will make things a lot more complicated.

Once you install Thrive Architect it is highly advisable that you watch the tutorial video by Shane Melaugh, who's the creator of this tool.

In fact, Shane Melaugh and the Thrive Themes team have a whole host of tutorials and videos which are worth watching, whatever the level of experience you have with Thrive Suite.

Installing Thrive Theme Builder

Before we proceed, there's a warning for people who want to switch their site to Thrive Theme Builder.

If you have an existing website with dozens of blog posts, custom coding, custom shortcodes, CSS coding, scripts, and a different theme, DO NOT follow these steps.

Go to Thrive Themes in the link below and watch their 4-part tutorial on how to switch your existing website to Thrive Theme Builder.

How to Switch Your Site to Thrive Theme Builder - you need to log in to Thrive to access this training.

This will ensure you know exactly what to do to prepare for a migration to Thrive Suite + the Thrive Shapeshift Theme or Ommi Theme.

The guide given here is only for people starting from scratch with their WordPress websites, which is much more simplistic and easier to switch to Thrive Theme Builder.

First thing before installing Thrive Theme Builder you need to deactivate the SG Optimizer and install another one that is designed to work alongside your Thrive theme.

Note: follow along with the tutorial.

We will cover site speed which is what SG Optimizer is all about, then you will understand why you're deactivating SG Optimizer.

Shapeshift Theme

Go to the Product Manager and install the theme (Shapeshift theme in this case).

Once again, you need to have Thrive Suite because Thrive Themes no longer sells individual plugins.

After that, wait for the theme to be installed, and then click on "Go to the Theme Builder Dashboard" where you will get the setup guide.

Click on "Get Started"

Next up you upload your logo which goes on top of your banner.

Then you set the colour of your overall theme.

You can always change colour scheme at any time when you want to change the global default colour of your website.

The header comes next.

You'll get a quick tip thing and you can choose in between many templates for your new header.

Again, you can always change the style of your header at any time.

For the footer, it's exactly the same thing again.

Choose footer style from the templates and click on choose and continue.

Here you have three choices for your Homepage, from ready-made templates, use one of your existing pages as a Homepage or display your blog as a Homepage.

Entirely up to you.

Then it is time to change the template for your blog posts.

Click on the top right corner to choose a new template for your blog posts.

Choose the template for your blog post list, or how your blog page will be displayed.

Remember that you can always come back later and change all of these templates at any time.

Pick one from the above list of templates.

After that, you choose a page template.

Those are the secondary pages such as About Us, Contact Us, legal pages, etc.

For these, you don't really need any template in special unless you're going to build landing pages for which the templates are designed.

To finalize you choose the main menu (left) and footer menu (right) and that's it.

All done!

Branding

Branding is pretty self-explanatory, but just to make sure:

• Theme colour – branding colour
• Logo – will be displayed on the left-hand side of your banner
• Favicon – the little icon next to the tab which is the branding that appears on top of your browser.

Typography

For the typography, you can either choose a global font for your entire typography or choose specific fonts for each individual headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) or texts etc.

For that, you just click on edit at the bottom right of typography and follow the breadcrumbs on top.

Basically, you can set the default font for each individual element:

H1

All headings

H2

That takes us to default templates.

Their function is to give you complete control to change the global theme for default blog posts, default pages, and so on.

You can always refer to Thrive Theme tutorial which is super detailed and comprehensive.

To finish with the setup process, let's now discuss the reason why we deactivated SG Optimizer.

Site Speed

Thrive Themes have been very smart with this and they've integrated minification and caching, image optimization and accelerated mobile pages within the theme so that it works specifically together with the theme.

That makes it very powerful because you don't need outside plugins that do not relate to the theme, so it does not overlap and potentially causing compatibility issues.

Setting Up Site Speed

First, click on Minification and Caching. Choose from the options it gives you. I would personally go for WP Fastest Cache simply because it's free and sufficient for the beginning.

Click on install and activate.

Click on configure.

Then you get a message from Thrive: "Are you Sure you want to Overwrite the Existing Cache Settings?"

Just click on "yes, configure the cache"

And that's it.

Note: WP Fastest Cache is a free plugin; although it is enough for starters, it has limited scope.

With the new Core Web Vitals score recently introduced by Google, it is highly recommended that you opt for the WP Rocket plugin, a premium paid plugin.

WP Rocket is the best plugin to optimize your site page speed.

Image optimization.

You should get two options: Optimole or Smush. The difference is that Optimole is a premium paid option and Smush is free.

Again, I'd choose Smush in the beginning simply because it's free, but be aware that it might be a good idea to upgrade to the premium version later on simply because it is better.

Click on install.

Last is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Click on the toggle to enable.

For AMP it's advisable to go to the app start-up guide which will give a quick rundown of what it is and what it actually does.

Take some time to read the guide.

I would leave the advanced configuration (below the start-up guide) for later.

And that's it for the setup. Looks a bit complicated, but once you understand how the tool works, it becomes second nature.

Creating a Web Page With Thrive Architect

For this step-by-step demo on how to use Thrive Architect options, we are using Shapeshift Theme which is the one we have installed for our website.

Ommi is available to all Thrive Suite customers, at no additional cost. Ommi is included in the latest version of Thrive Theme Builder.

The first step is to click on start new page on your WordPress cPanel, give the page a name, click on save a draft and launch with Thrive Architect.

You will be given a selection of Thrive Architect template options.

For the purpose of this post, I'll start from a completely blank page.

Thrive Architect user interface is quite straightforward to use.

After clicking on "add block" you will be prompted by a selection of block types.

I'll choose "Benefits and Features" from the left side menu and pick a template for my main content block.

The content block template will appear in your main editing area.

Note that because it's a completely blank page, the content block does not inherit any colour as seen on the list of templates.

Colours on the template list is purely for demonstration.

If you change the content block from an existing designed page, the block will inherit the colour scheme of your existing page, only changing the layout.

There are two panels for all the editing elements inside your block.

The left panel will edit all your content, such as Main Options, which is related to the overall layout of your block, Decorations, Typography, Layout, and Position.

On the right panel you will have all the drag-and-drop elements that you might want to add to your block.

Breadcrumbs

The most important thing to observe are the breadcrumbs on top of your page.

Breadcrumbs display all the layers you will be working on, which layer to delete and what is what on the overall layout.

This is the principle of outside-in whereby a container is selected and the changes happen there instead of having to make changes to each element separately.

Moreover, this principle allows you to set a general rule inside the container so that each element will automatically align itself with all the other elements within the column.

Whichever elements you add inside the column, it will obey the general rule and remain in line with the other content elements.

Editing Panels

The right-side menu of the drag-and-drop menu has 3 main functions:

Central Style Panel is where you control the overall style of the page.

Change of Template is where you can change the block template at any point you wish.

Settings will change the setting of the page you're working with.

The focus point now is the drag-and-drop menu.

I started by editing the text of the header.

You can always follow the element you're working on through the breadcrumbs above.

Following that, I've selected every element inside the box for the purpose of demonstration.

The next 4 photos show how the elements inside each box relate to the breadcrumbs.

Understanding Breadcrumbs

• Icon inside content box – inside column – inside columns – inside block

• Text inside content box – inside column – inside columns – inside block

• Text inside content box – inside column – inside columns – inside block

• Text inside block

That's the best way to demonstrate the essential structure of how Thrive Architect works.

Inserting Icons Inside Your Content Box

There are two ways of inserting icons.

One way is to use the pre-designed area and the other is to drag-and-drop a new icon from the right panel.

I have chosen the drag-and-drop way for the purpose of the demo.

Within Thrive Architect interface, instead of looking through the whole list of options, you can simply type the element you want in the search box as shown and use the drag-and-drop feature to place it inside the box.

The rest of the process basically comprises deleting the template icon, choosing an icon from the list, and adding it to your box.

Now I want to add a photo below the boxes to illustrate the intent of those 3 boxes.

For that, I will delete all the boxes below and clean up all the columns.

The delete button is the far-right option shown with a bin icon on top of each box.

From the right panel, you drag-and-drop the image option right below the 3 boxes, following the highlight indication of where your element will be placed on the page.

Upload your photo to the Image Library.

Before I place the image I'll drag-and-drop the text box below the image.

Media Library

Time to select the image from the Image Library - note that this is not a required order, just my personal choice.

Note that in this step it is essential that you always describe the image in the Alt Text box and give the image a Title.

That's important for SEO.

The Alt Text should preferably be related to the main keyword of your page or blog posts.

Click on Insert into post.

On second thought, let me switch the position of my text box from below the image to above the image.

I deleted the box below and added another box above the photo.

This is just to exemplify that you can change everything at any stage without compromising the construction of your content template.

Layout & Position

The box in the Layout and Position gives you the general spacing from inside the element, as well as from the outside of the element

Spacing was increased from the inside of my block, in which case it's the only option because blocks are the innermost layer in the overall layout [see breadcrumbs].

Here I have changed the top inner spacing (which is in blue) of the block from 60 pxls to 90 pxls.

The outer spacing layer is greyed out because that's the primary block in the overall construction. It's always clearly marked in the breadcrumbs for reference.

Colours

For the background colour for my main block, always following the breadcrumbs, you simply click on the option marked with an arrow.

Clicking on the box will open the prism of colour options. From there you can customize it to any colour you wish.

Once you've decided on your favourite colour, markdown to colour code for future reference, or simply copy and paste the code for something else.

Note that even if you set a different global colour theme for your site during the setup process, you can always customize it however you like by either changing it globally or changing it for each individual page you build.

Once you're happy with the colour click on "apply".

Now I want to change the colour of the content boxes [see breadcrumbs].

The same process applies.

In the last photo below I have lightened the blue background for more contrast.

Always pay attention to the breadcrumbs which is an important Thrive Architect element.

Typography

For the last touch to my page, as you can see the text size of my header is smaller than the text size above the photo.

Let's balance that.

Next up is to increase pixels by either entering a higher value or sliding the toggle to the right.

If it's too big to fit properly into the box, you can try to adjust the Layout and Position. Failing that, you'll need to try several sizes until you find a good balance.

With a few more tweaking and adjusting we found a better balance.

Voila! Your page is basically built.

This is a very simplistic page layout to demonstrate the main features and how you can go about designing your website.

Possibilities with Thrive Themes are virtually endless.

Inside their member dashboard, you can find lots and lots of tutorials to guide you to make the most of designing your website.

You can also find very helpful guides and tips inside Thrive Architect tutorial pages and videos.

We hope this basic tutorial offers valuable help and information.

Build your online business today with Thrive Themes!

Thrive Themes Pricing

From February 2021 Thrive Themes announced that they will stop selling individual plugins and now everything is under the same umbrella called Thrive Suite.

There are two discounted plans:

• Quarterly - $90
• Annually - $228

The annual plan works out at $19 per month which is by far the cheapest price plan for any website page builder of a similar category.

It is a particularly great value because of its all-in-one features which cover everything anyone needs to set up a professional website for marketing purposes.

Conclusion

Thrive Themes is the perfect marketing tool for WordPress sites.

Without Thrive Themes you need tons and tons (and tons) of plugins and marketing tools to optimize your WordPress website to increase your conversions.

It can be a daunting process.

However, Thrive Themes is explicitly designed to solve this headache.

So, if you are a WordPress blogger, or you have a site on WordPress, Thrive Suite is your online marketing solution.

You can create landing pages, pop-ups, times, sales funnels, and a whole host of options that you would otherwise need way too many external plugins for.

Things can easily turn south when you have so many plugins which are not optimized to work in harmony, and that's when Thrive Themes comes in.

It is also suitable for people who want the freedom to choose specific third-party platforms to integrate with.

For WordPress website owners, Thrive Themes is definitely the tool of choice.

How To Create A Blog Post With Thrive Themes

Source: https://techpreference.com/websites/how-to-create-website-thrive-architect/

Posted by: mcelfreshvies1948.blogspot.com

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