Thrive Theme Builder: First Thoughts

Thrive Theme Builder: First Thoughts

After many months of waiting, I spent the afternoon playing around with Thrive Theme Builder.

Here’s a quick conclusion: It’s very powerful, and will fit perfectly with some of the things I intend to do. I will be using it on new projects going forward. However, I won’t be switching this site, and other projects, for a while. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I want to get used to the interface and properties; it’s not an easy and intuitive software because it takes a while to get things right. Secondly, it’s still pretty buggy, and I expect the Thrive Team to sort this out in the next couple of weeks as the soft launch gets underway.

Site Design Moving Forward

As I’ve alluded to in past posts and elsewhere, my goal for 2020 is to build as many passive revenue generating assets as possible.

By this, I mean ebooks, info-products, websites of various kinds, and a couple of other things I hope to get around to. The reason for this is probably obvious, but ultimately one of the beautiful things about the internet is that you can create countless little assets and streams of income that work so that you don’t have to.

Imagine this being a strong possibility and here’s me sat in front of the computer for many hours a day most days a week. Seems stupid, and I want to see just how stupid it is.

Add to that all the other motivations you might have for creating passive income as well.

Where does site design fit into this?

Well, when you’re talking about creating digital assets, the creation is quite straightforward and relatively pleasant:

• To create an ebook, you write into Microsoft Word, Scrivener or your processor of choice, and then hit “Save.”
• To create a blog post, you open up your Word processor and write. Then do a bunch of other stuff.
• If you want to create a website that sells the ebooks, you simply repeat the above steps multiple times.
• For online courses and other higher-ticket items, you either become a Gumroad Guru or you host your own courses; I recommend the latter but with a caveat…

That caveat being that the website design process is a massive pain in the arse and running websites is generally a headache and adds many hours onto your “passive asset escape velocity.”

Going forward, I want to change that.

Minimalist Design, Pre-Defined Structure

Going forward, I’m making my life easier. My goal is to create multiple sites quickly, and not ever really think about the design. This will be done by concentrating on a few things:

• Very simple site design (One would call it minimalist but that’s a bit high-brow)
• Concentrate on typography, creatives and voice to create “branding”
• Skeleton set ups so that I can quickly deploy and concentrate mostly on the above as well as writing the content

This should be easy. But it often isn’t, because WordPress is a bit of a nightmare, to be honest.

With most themes, you can get very good templates. But then you stick your content on them or you have a specific need or look you want, and you either have to suck it up or you can spend hours handcoding the CSS for minute aesthetic changes.

If you like that sort of thing, fine… but I’d rather just copy and paste from Word and be done with it.

That’s where Thrive Theme Builder is strong. It’s pretty much, bugs aside, a What-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. If you don’t like an element, you simply click and delete it. If you want a different colour, you click and change the colour.

It’s a bit fiddly, but incredibly powerful.

And here’s the best bit: It makes global changes to your pages and posts.

I don’t really like Thrive Architect and I don’t like the whole Gutenberg thing that has invaded WordPress in later versions. It’s temperamental, time-consuming and you have to do things multiple times. Make a beautiful blog post? Congratulations… do it again next time.

This is entirely against the ethos of “Write it in Word and then copy paste.”

So Thrive Theme Builder is better for that goal because you do it once, and hopefully then you’re back to copy/pasting your Word documents in.

That’s the plan. We’ll see how it works.