05 Jun Visual Composer
Most of our websites these days are using a software addon called Visual Composer, which adds a lot of functionality to the WordPress editor.
The most immediate advantage of Visual Composer is that is presents an easy way to lay content out within the page. Whereas with the bare WordPress editor you have to rely on aligning text and images, or creating tables, Visual Composer lets you add rows divided up into columns of various proportions. As well as this it let’s you add content that wouldn’t normally be easily available within a page; such as blog/posts feed, sliders, pre-made buttons, tabs and accordions and much more. Theme specific functions such as pre-made call to action boxes or fancy headings etc, are also available in Visual Composer.
Let’s take a quick look at the basic functionality. Here are the first few steps in adding content in a custom layout with visual composer:
- Create or edit your page. Here I have created a test page, I recommend this as a way of trialing layouts until you are happy with it. If you don’t see the Visual Composer tools you need to click the Backend Editor button.
- Click the ‘Plus’ icon under the Visual Composer heading to add content.
- Although you can add different types of content directly, for easy layouts it’s best to create a row first.
- Now you can divide that row into columns. Select the column layout using the ‘multi-line’ icon near the top left of the row box. In this example I have divided it into 3 equal columns.
- Now you need to add content to the columns. Do this by clicking the plus icon in the center of the column. For this example I have added text blocks (by far the most common thing used), and left the holding text in. The picture below gives you the end result on the live page – text arranged into 3 columns.
This is just scratching the service of what you can do with Visual Composer but hopefully it will give you a starting point to begin using this powerful software on your WordPress site.