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BoldGrid: The Best WordPress Website Builder?

There is a saying in the web community when it comes to web design: WYSIWYG. This stands for: What You See Is What You Get. In a majority of cases – theme developers sell themes that have to be rebuilt from scratch to imitate what inspired a customer to buy via the marketplace. You have to download dummy text, populate your theme with all of the presets, and hope that the functionality that inspired you to buy the theme will cross over from your purchase. This can be taxing, time-consuming and a big headache.

We’ve seen a lot of “drag and drop” builders come and go. Some like Shopify, Weebly, Wix and Square Space have stayed, but even these builders have their limits. You never own the content, and if you ever decide that you need to move, you can’t because you technically don’t own the website that you built. It seems that there are only two options with websites being built. You hire a designer and pay upwards of $5000, or build on the limited infrastructure of web builders like Wix, but surrender the right to all of your content and data. It seems like customers have no more than these two options.

Except, there is now something called BoldGrid.

What is BoldGrid?

In short, BoldGrid is a drag and drop web builder built on WordPress – the one of the most popular and largest CMS’ on the web. With that, let’s get into what it can do by visiting some of the features that it hosts.

Features you should be aware of that BoldGrid offers for its clients:

• Drag and Drop editor

o   A lot of companies have been moving toward this feature because of its ease of use and the fact that the novice user of website building can strap into the chair of the “website” and “internet” world and essentially ‘plug-n-play.’

o   BoldGrid’s drag and Drop editor isn’t too different from the ones out on the market in terms of its functionality. BUT. There is a difference of ‘WHERE’ and ‘WHEN’ you can drag and drop, which is a huge factor. The BoldGrid editor allows on site and live page edits that take place EXACTLY as you would have them running on a WordPress Engine.

o   Users have the advantage of tools that: clone, copy, edit, and resize. Overall a great tool to use at your discretion.

• Free Themes

o   Did you say free? Yeah well this is where BoldGrid really pulls out one of its aces. The free themes upon downloading BoldGrid are not just WordPress optimized and mobile optimized (a.k.a responsive – which they actually, happen to be); they are custom built by the BoldGrid team.

o   [Insert a screenshot of the Categories]

o   One sub-category of this section is the “auto-populate” feature that comes with every BoldGrid theme.

• Say you’re a photographer. Then, for this example, you choose the “Haven” theme from BoldGrid. Once you download and choose that theme, the content that is custom curated for photographers has already been applied to your website.
• Of course there will be some problems with duplicate content  – but that’s where you would step in and make sure that most of the content and copy are adjusted to your audience and followers
• Color Pallets and Customization

o   So this is really where you get to understand that the developers of BoldGrid really did their due-diligence when creating the application. The color pallets and customization of responsive themes all come together here in a revolutionary way. Say you have an idea of what your theme or website’s brand is going to be – well then fine, you can adjust everything on the site according to your vision. BoldGrid goes a step further than just a color dial here. They have a list of color pallets that you can choose from that have already been pre-organized by their web designers to be the most responsive to the themes that you choose.

o   Of course if you love the color choices for the borders, text and title but want to change the CTA’s on your page to something that is different from what is already provided – then you have the ability to do that by custom clicking around (using the drag and drop editor) in the theme editor and testing for the right fit.

• Staging Servers

o   It’s not really a server, but you get the idea right? No? Dang – well here is a more simplified version of that. You know when you want to overhaul your website with a new design or some new feature and function (like an ecommerce shop/plugin)? Well that’s where Staging really comes in hand. With Staging you have finally have the ability to mess around with your website’s settings while it’s still live with the original version.

o   Just image a mirror reflecting an apple on a table. With staging, you get to mess around with the physics and appearance of the apple’s reflection. Then when you want that new apple that you’ve messed around with to become real – you wave your magic wand and WALLA! – the staging server (i.e reflection) comes to life in place of the original

o   [Add a picture of a staging server]

• Make Money! (well not exactly)

o   WordPress is no longer limited to the “blog.” Sure you might hear names like “The New York Times” use WordPress – which is great for content creators. But that doesn’t mean that all of the business minded people out there need to fret. WordPress’s #1 plugin for ecommerce is also available and BoldGrid offers support for it. We are of course speaking about WooCommerce!

o   [enter affiliate link for WooCommerce]

• Now you have the ability to design your storefront for you blog or website on BoldGrid and plug in WooCommerce with all of your items for sale

 

“Plugins, give me plugins!”

• A plugin itself, BoldGrid also offers its own array of plugins that diversify your website’s offerings. Their main three are: Forms, Galleries, and SEO. Let’s explore them to see what makes them so special.
  • Forms
    • Great thing is that BoldGrid is integrated seamlessness with Ninja Forms. Create rich web forms with minimal effort – where you can customize almost everything. If you’re looking to import/export your forms –you’re in luck, you can do that too.
  • Picture Galleries
    • If you’re looking at building slideshows, or fancy galleries then you’re in luck. BoldGrid’s plugin offers you to just select your preferred media, drag and drop it into place with it responding to the dimensions that you have pre-selected. If you need to adjust, just use the on-site adjustment tools that even a novice can master.
  • SEO
    • You know what SEO is! Right? Well, even if you don’t (it stands for Search Engine Optimization, by the way) there is a plugin that BoldGrid offers to help with it. If you’re still curious as to what it is, SEO is basically the way a search engine finds your website when someone is looking for specific content.
      • [more on SEO in this article — you can plug in an article here or link to InMotion’s Blog Post, which you can put an Aff link to as well.] 

• Tech Support

• Yeah but…doesn’t everyone have tech support? Yes, but not like what BoldGrid is offering as a web builder. The thing about other web builders is that although they may have a forum (say, something like what Wix has in their Help Center), BoldGrid offers an extensive list of detailed articles; not just the walls of text as boring as a “terms of service” booklet.
• A cool feature as well is the fact that BoldGrid’s tech support is available 24/7/365 – and it’s all in-house – they don’t hire out. This of course helps with any confusion between product and tech questions.

“Clean Code”

• ‘Clean Code’ is their term, not ours. The best way we can describe is that BoldGrid has “clean” code in their Text Editor mode that is better than Wix and Weebly’s. Now, is that true? Does that mean Wix or Weebly would have “dirty” code? Not necessarily, but what we think they mean is that when you get access to the code (the raw, good stuff) that you can clean up your H1’s, and meta copy to help with SEO and boost load times. We’re sure that if it works as we assume it would, then your web developers will be thankful for this little featurette.

Web Hosting

• If you want your website to get activated and “online” you’ll need to get it onto some web hosting. Fortunately, BoldGrid already comes pre-installed when you buy through InMotion Hosting. And there is even a little secret to BoldGrid…it was created by InMotion Hosting. Shocking? Not really – it’s a smart move, as they can control all aspects of getting you set up and online in a heartbeat. That’s why we love using BoldGrid. It’s no nonsense. But, let’s say that you one day wanted to move away from InMotion Hosting’s web hosting…that’s fine, because BoldGrid, unlike Wix and Weebly is a completely independent code index that you When you go through say a Wix or Shopify…they own your web content – not you.

 

Flickr & Fotolia Integration

• All websites NEED photos – otherwise they’d be stuck in the early 2000’s with walls of text that drive away customers. BoldGrid make adding picture easier than ever, especially when you are pitted with two choices in this day and age: (1) copy/paste from Google Images and risk infringing on someone else’s trademarked photo, or (2) pay premium photo resellers like iStock or Getty Images upwards to $10 per photo.
• With the API integrations of Fotolia and Flickr – BoldGrid’s system allows you to buy appropriate photos through a “credit” or point system that makes it more affordable to populate your website with creative content.

 

In all, we recommend BoldGrid because it’s a great way for professionals and beginners to work intimately with their websites so that they make productive work of their purpose. We want you to succeed, and see BoldGrid as the fastest, easiest, most economic, and best way to get you there – or at least to start the journey.