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Design

alida strydom
PLUS
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points
Posted by alida strydom
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points

Drag-n-drop Wordpress themes

Don't know if these forums were intended for the following, but here goes:

I'm working in-house for a place who swear by drag-n-drop themes such as BeTheme. What are your thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of themes such as these?

So far, I'd MAYBE say an advantage COULD be that they're good for prototyping? -- Emphasis on MAYBE.

A definite disadvantage that I've found so far is the impact on the loading time of the site. Muffin Group's BeTheme has a themes settings tab where the author can insert their own CSS --but view the source of this the following site to see where said custom css is being inserted: http://inivo.co.uk/

3 Answers

Denny Tang
Denny Tang
1,012 Points
Denny Tang
Denny Tang
1,012 Points

I used a lot of these drag-and-drop builders (iThemes Builder, Visual Composer, AESOP, Genesis, Elegant Builder, WP-Types/Views/Cred etc.).

Pros:

  • Easier and faster to design a page without any HTML knowledge

Cons:

  • Requires other people to learn the plugin
  • Can contain undiscovered security issues (i.e. recently a serious XSS vulnerability was discovered a couple days ago with the Visual Composer plugin)
  • Excess code and css/js files can slow down website
  • May not be futureproof

I haven't tried BeTheme but I stopped buying themes that require their own page builder. This is because if you're changing themes, it can break your website. The better solution for your client is to use a plugin like Visual Composer that works on all themes and doesn't require theme developers to support it.

alida strydom
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points
alida strydom
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points

Thanks for that.

"Excess code and css/js files can slow down website" is basically the source of all my woes right now.

The problem with the XSS vulnerability just makes things a lot worse too.

Thanks again

Stanley Thijssen
Stanley Thijssen
22,831 Points
Stanley Thijssen
Stanley Thijssen
22,831 Points

These themes are very easy to use for people who dont want to dive into wordpress too much or who dont have much time. So it's easy and fast to adjust things without knowing anything or not much about code. This has much impact on indeed the load time because theres alot of code inside this theme that eventually will not even be used.

alida strydom
PLUS
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points
alida strydom
alida strydom
Courses Plus Student 1,712 Points

What can i put forward in attempt to sell the prospect of....well...doing things properly?...as well as "improved load time"?