Case Studies - Visual Composer Website Builder

Case Study: How CTS Agency Creates Custom Sites Using Less Code with Visual Composer

Nikola Puciriusa — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 07:42:19 +0000

CTS Agency is a digital marketing company of eight people and counting, with a strong sense of social responsibility and a focus on cause-based projects. They also have plans to expand their business in the near future.

Visual Composer has helped them to do this by saving them time and headaches when it comes to building websites for their clients. With Visual Composer, CTS Agency can create 100% of their clients' websites with close to zero code, which allows them to focus on their mission and grow their business.

In this interview, Greg Trujillo, co-founder, and co-owner of CTS Agency walks us through:

How he got into web development
How Visual Composer has made it easier for their senior developers to focus on more complex tasks while allowing junior developers to take on simpler tasks
And how they make the world a better place through their work.

Tell us more about what you do and how long you have been in the business?

Greg Trujillo:
We started a little over ten years ago and the idea was to create a social media company. So websites weren't something that even was of any interest to us. But as we started doing more in the social media marketing space, we found that websites were necessary.

A lot of people were thinking of social media as a website replacement. But we found that you still need to drive people to a website and an experience that you control, for overall marketing effectiveness. So we started to dive into websites.

I'm a computer engineer by training, so I didn't know a lot about the web world, but many coding languages, whether it's C++ or JavaScript, have a lot of similarities to them. So that was kind of easy for me to pick up and start learning about web development.

Ten years ago, we were just two people. And now fast forward ten years, we're eight people and growing and we serve a multitude of different clients from non-profits to romance authors, lawyers, and service industries.

But really what we like to focus on is cause-based organizations. So whether it's a for-profit company or a non-profit, somebody with a social cause that they want to put forward and how they're trying to make the world a better place, not just by selling sneakers or something, but through their mission. So those are our ideal clients - people that are trying to change the world.

Can you tell us what CTS stands for?

Greg Trujillo:
Our agency is called CTS Agency. The CTS is an acronym for Creative, Technical, and Social. Those are the avenues that we focus on when we're putting together marketing campaigns for our clients.

Filip Galetic:
What do each of those parts mean to you personally?

Greg Trujillo:
So when creating a strategy for marketing campaigns, it takes strategic technical knowledge on how to apply certain parts of the strategy and also a sense of creativity to captivate the people that you're trying to market to.

CTS Agency website built in Visual Composer. Source: CTS Agency

And additionally, because of the way that Web 2.0 is right now, there is a vast social layer to that. So you need to make sure that we're not just broadcasting out to people, but we're creating a conversation and a dialog.

On your LinkedIn profile, you mention that you built your first computer when you were just ten years old. What's the backstory behind that?

Greg Trujillo:
So when I was ten years old, my father worked a technology job in the military. They called that microwave satellite repair. And he worked a lot with computers and different technologies. And so he brought some of that home, not his work specifically, but some of that knowledge.

So he would buy computer components and we would work together on building a computer, installing the operating system, and just overall learning about technology. I probably was the first kid on my block to have access to the Internet.

Do you have a strong passion for social responsibility? And if so, what do you enjoy most about it?

Greg Trujillo:
I like helping people that help people. So really, when it comes to social responsibility, I have been involved personally and adjacent to a lot of people who have had bad situations because of a lack of social responsibility in the world in general. Because of the situations that I and people that I know have been through, I like working with organizations that try to alleviate those conditions.

For example, I have personally experienced homelessness and that makes our work with several different homelessness organizations in the region especially meaningful. Additionally, I've had friends who have gone through a divorce due to domestic violence. And so we help domestic violence organizations as well. Really, we love to work with anyone trying to help people who are experiencing a negative situation, which is a common experience across the world.

We just want to help those kinds of organizations because they don't have the funding usually to work with a really big marketing company. And we like to be able to give them the kind of attention that they deserve, but on a budget that they can afford.

Filip Galetic:
That's wonderful. And I mean, those issues you've mentioned, they can often come in a package, right? Homelessness, domestic violence…

Greg Trujillo:
Yes. They spiderweb out and a lot of them touch each other.

Filip Galetic:
Yeah. It's great that you have this niching. Obviously, this is a good way to help your business grow in general but then when it also helps others, you're the winner here. So congrats. Well done.

Do you have any kind of plans to grow further? How long did it take to reach the current point you're at?

Greg Trujillo:
Yeah, absolutely. So when we started ten years ago, we were just two people and we remained two people for a few years, working with contractors to fulfill needs because neither of us could design. We’d need a designer, so we were able to do that for a while. And as our clients had expanded needs, we realized that we just don't have the time and contractors aren't fulfilling it.

So we needed to bring on people and once we started bringing on employees and having people working full-time, we found that our two original people were able to go out and sell more projects. And so more projects meant that we needed more people. And it's kind of been in an ebb and flow growth trajectory where we have eight employees and then it'll come down to six employees and then go back up a little bit.

And so now we have a really solid employee base. They're excited to continue to work on these projects. They've been working with us for anywhere from 2 to 3 years. We brought them in as junior employees and now they're ready to move up and gain management experience by supervising junior employees themselves.

Filip Galetic:
Sounds great.

Greg Trujillo:
Yeah. We plan to keep expanding. One of the parts specifically is web development, and that's changed immensely because of things like Visual Composer. Before we were manually building everything. Not only the custom frontend with custom functionality, but also we would modify the admin area of WordPress. So that way it was more user-friendly for our clients.

Now with Visual Composer, it's very easy for our clients in the admin area because we can save a lot of the custom things that we make with Visual Composer. Our clients can easily drag-and-drop the buttons or anything else that we've styled specifically for them. So that makes the admin area a non-issue.

And then also, with all the updates that Visual Composer has had over the last couple of years, it's made it very easy for us to style things that before would have taken a lot longer and would have been a little more of a headache having to do it custom in the PHP & CSS files.

Could you give a rough estimate of how much faster you can get things done with Visual Composer?

Greg Trujillo:
Yeah. So before Visual Composer, we were making a full custom page that had been created by our designer. Developing it for both mobile and desktop would take approximately a day. And that's on a good day with a low functionality page. In Visual Composer that's a couple of hours with the functionality and styling options being built-in.

The same page could be done within 2 hours on Visual Composer where it would previously take a developer all day.

And when reviewing the work that a developer does with Visual Composer, even if I have ten changes they need to make, those changes are done within 30 minutes. Where, if I requested those changes from the developer who had hand-coded it, everything we're talking about would take another 3 hours, and maybe it's delivered to me tomorrow.

Visual Composer has immensely sped up our production because now we don't need a full-fledged developer to build out the pages, we can use a junior developer who has a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

Do you follow strict processes when it comes to your agency workflows?

Greg Trujillo:
So basically when it comes to our processes, especially with web development, we do have processes in place, which we are documenting. But when it comes to web development, what we usually do, after we understand the goals of the client, is wireframe based on Visual Composer at that point.

So with what we know Visual Composers' capabilities and designs to be, we wireframe based off of that, making sure to keep our client's goals in mind, and then we start to design and beautify it once they've approved those designs. So yeah, we fully incorporate Visual Composers from the beginning and make sure that our designers have gone in and played with the different functionalities of Visual Composers and looked at the styling of it.

That way they can understand what's going to be easy to modify and what is a little more complex to modify. So when creating a website for a client based on what their needs are, it’s amazing to see how far we can go on the modifications with Visual Composer.

Visual Composer makes it so easy to do those sorts of modifications with CSS. Half of the modifications that I need are available within the Visual Composer elements anyways.

A lot of those are great and it just makes it so easy that we pretty much have gone to 100% incorporating Visual Composer. Before it was only for certain features and now it's full-fledged across the website.

How do you structure your business model?

Greg Trujillo:
Since we are a marketing agency, which is the way that we approach a lot of our services, we have a lot of agency-of-record clients. So they buy a retainer, usually an amount of our time for the entire year. And then we try to section out how many hours we can work per month. And of course, since they bought our time for the year, that's a little more fluid. If they need more hours this month, we can put those in. If they need fewer hours, we can save them for another month.

We do have a lot of clients who prefer to work on that basis. But we also have one-off clients, and these are my favorite kind of projects, the one-offs that are wildly out there.

We had a client who had a real-world physical device to measure fluid inside of a container and wanted us to program a way to get the information from that device onto an analytics dashboard that we were also supposed to design and create. So we were working on that project – their whole thing is fluid inside of barrels for car washes.

So the way that they measure the fluid in car wash barrels is with a Sharpie, they just mark it with a Sharpie and put the date next to it. This person was creating a new piece of technology for that purpose. And we were able to build the web component that displayed in real time what the fluid levels were, gave them alerts on fluid usage, and also the ability to reorder products directly from their analytics tool.

What's next for your agency?

Greg Trujillo:
We do have a few clients that are outside of Florida and outside of the United States, international clients as well. What we're focusing on are cause-based clients that are interested in social causes and those branding campaigns and efforts that they may be putting forward. We found that we're really good at creating brand taglines and then being able to promote those directly to an audience.

For example, we're working on a Florida-wide youth drug prevention campaign which might make people, at least in America, think of the abstinence-focused DARE campaign, but this takes a different approach.

A cause-based website built by CTS Agency in Visual Composer. Source: Better Without It.

Instead of just saying no, what we're doing is talking about positive reinforcement for healthy habits rather than telling people that if you do drugs, you'll ruin your life. Instead, if you focus on your passions, that opens a lot of doors for your future. We encourage people to focus on healthy habits and things that are going to help them now and throughout their lives.

Fillip Galetic:
Right? That's such a huge topic. And the whole 'just say no' has this inherent 'you're bad' undertone that doesn't work very successfully at all, does it?

Greg Trujillo:
Those abstinence-only ideas just don't work. And nowadays with advertising, it doesn't matter who you're advertising to. Gen Z has the Internet. They can Google things for themselves – you can't B.S. anybody anymore. So you’ve got to find different ways to communicate messages that they want to hear.

A cause-based website built by CTS Agency in Visual Composer. Source: Orlando Science Center.

Have you used any other website builder apart from Visual Composer and how would you compare them?

Greg Trujillo:
Oh yeah. We inherit a lot of website maintenance contracts and they already have their previous web development company put in a website builder.

So we've used a multitude of different website builders and none of them really compares to Visual Composer in terms of the capabilities and ease of use for the features.

A lot of them kind of get there a little bit, but there are little quirks that make it more difficult and less adjustable for those that have the inclination to do it.

With Visual Composer, especially the admin area updates for the Font Manager and things like that, they make it so amazing now to just create an entire site from scratch that would have taken days, weeks, and even months. I see some of these websites that we've sold that would have taken me an entire week to build as a weekend project now.

What are some of the other features that stand out to you in Visual Composer, and that you use regularly?

Greg Trujillo:
Some of the features that I use and love the most are the templating features and the layout features – being able to create templates and layouts and apply them across different sections of the website. And then we're able to select that template to apply. So I love that aspect of it. It brings that original layer of creation that WordPress had.

It’s exactly like creating a template for your WordPress theme, but Visual Composer makes it much easier.

Plus the Font Manager, I can't even say how amazing it is because being able to not only set the fonts but set the font sizes and styles per screen size is an absolute godsend because before, we'd have to code in via CSS and have the font file in the website itself. Not only that but then coded for each breakpoint of what size it was going to be.

Do you find any benefits to using Dynamic Content, such as time savings or better reactions from clients?

Greg Trujillo:
When it comes to dynamic content for Visual Composer, that's something we use a lot because we create custom post types for our clients. Right now we're still using the old way where we’ll go into the functions using? PHP, and create a custom post type, but then with the dynamic content in Visual Composer - when we've created, for example, a custom post type to spotlight their members – we're able to grab the content dynamically from these. Which I find amazing because it's not just the built-in stuff that comes with WordPress.

When we create different post types manually Visual Composers can detect that and pull the content in dynamically. So that way, if we just want the highlighted posts that we've assigned, for example, the category of 'featured,' Visual Composer can grab that even from a non-native custom post type, which I find amazing and works well.

...because then again we can create the post type and Visual Composer can handle all the heavy lifting of displaying it.

Apart from running the agency you also teach marketing courses and do public speaking. Tell us more about that.

Greg Trujillo:
We teach non-profit marketing courses here locally. And additionally, we've been brought out to different cities to teach marketing classes and also help to put on a marketing conference every year.

Filip Galetic:
When is the next conference and is it maybe niche for the cause marketing?

Greg Trujillo:
Yeah. Well, it's social media focused and the conference is called Social Fresh. It should be next year in June. That one has some cause-based content in it, but a lot of it is big brand social media.

A conference for Social Media Managers, co-hosted by Greg Trujillo. Source: Social Fresh

If you were starting today in building CTS, what advice would you give yourself?

Greg Trujillo:
Especially when it comes to web development, understanding enough about CSS and HTML will help build about 80% of websites that clients will ever ask for.

If I were starting my company today instead of ten years ago, I would tell myself that while it's nice to know how to build things from scratch, it's not necessary, especially with tools like Visual Composer.

It's when clients are looking for those really custom features that just don't exist anywhere else that you might need to lean on somebody with more development knowledge. But when it comes down to the ease of being able to template and design with Visual Composer, you can create custom solutions for clients without having to have extensive web development knowledge.

Filip Galetic:
That means a lot coming from an experienced web agency owner and expert developer like yourself. Thanks a lot and we'll keep in touch.

The post Case Study: How CTS Agency Creates Custom Sites Using Less Code with Visual Composer appeared first on Visual Composer Website Builder.

How Web Creators Made 10 Websites in 3 Months Using Visual Composer

Linda R — Wed, 25 May 2022 17:38:02 +0000

Web agencies and web creators who are focused on growing their business and offering smoother customer experiences to their clients, rely on website builder tools and plugins to cut away parts of the web development process that slow down delivery.

In this entry in our case study series, where we focus on showcasing how using Visual Composer benefits web professionals, we are spotlighting Oleg Kozlovski, the founder of the web agency Alotropy, based in North America.

His company has been in the business since 2012, helping develop websites and landing pages for various businesses, and the whole company structure consists of just two people — a project manager, and a designer. Since discovering Visual Composer in 2019, he has been using it ever since and shares with us exactly how it has helped him work more efficiently.

About the Challenges Before Using Visual Composer, and Why They Were So Significant for the Business

Oleg acknowledges that he faced various challenges before finding Visual Composer as the solution. The first challenge was time.

“If you need to create a website in a matter of days, Visual Composer allows you to prototype and create a site and launch it. You can see how the site will look on various devices and easily correct whatever mistakes that may arise.”

The second challenge was the learning curve.

“Once I create a site, I usually pass it on to someone else for administration. A normal PC user is able to do simple tasks in Visual Composer in a matter of minutes. It’s fairly easy to learn and doesn’t require much design/developer knowledge.”

He admitted that inefficient use of time was the biggest factor that had a negative impact on his business and that it needed to be improved. Now, since he has discovered Visual Composer and has been using it on all of his client's sites, he is able to complete more projects in less time.

“And most importantly the [Visual Composer] sites don’t look like the typical WordPress premade sites.”

Oleg Kozlovski web agency's website 'Alantropy' #MadeInVC. Source: Alantropy

About Experimenting With Other Solutions and Why They Didn’t Work as Good

Oleg had initially tried WPBakery page builder. Although he found it to be a bit slow, he was convinced enough to give the next-generation Visual Composer Website Builder a try.

He had also previously tried using Elementor but was hesitant to continue using it, because the builder was too complicated and, in his own words, 'messy'.

One of the biggest advantages of Visual Composer, from his point of view, is that it allows you to write custom CSS and JavaScript. Unlike some other website builders, as he admitted, that, unfortunately, follow a logic that's only known to its own developers.

“Adding a header to a web page with WebGL in Visual Composer is easy, and it works without any problems.”

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About Discovering Visual Composer

Oleg discovered Visual Composer the same way many people discover new information these days - through search engines.

He found out about the more time-efficient web development product through online searches, right after the owner of WPBakery created Visual Composer — the React-based, no-shortcode, full website builder. See the difference between Visual Composer and WPBakery.

He admitted that the trend in the web industry that drove the need for using Visual Composer was the need for websites that looked good and were mobile-friendly before anything else.

Highlighting the responsive design feature, that automatically adapts the website to look good on mobile devices, while still allowing custom optimization of the website elements for specific devices to ensure high speed and better usability.

'Ciudad Creativa Digital' UI/UX Web Development Project. Source: Alontropy

As well as what sparked Oleg's interest in Visual Composer exactly, was that the new website builder was created in React JS, which seemed very interesting to him.

With Visual Composer being developed using React JS, it amplifies the reactiveness and receptiveness of the builder. By offering responsive templates, addons, and numerous content elements that help with building mobile-first websites, the exact factor that is so important to him and his business.

Web Agency Owners Favorite Visual Composer Features

The first feature that Oleg highlights that helps him and his clients meet their needs, is the ability to style texts site-wide [referring to the Font Manager Addon].

“It may seem like a very small feature, but it saves you a lot of time when you set the style for an H2 element and you know that it will be the same everywhere on the site unless you edit it.”

The second feature that he finds very helpful is the ability to edit the style of each row and column, depending on the device that you are using. It allows you to change the background or the video, according to what device is being used. Yet another shout out to the design options Visual Composer offers for customizing website elements for specific device types.

The last, but not least important feature, he highlighted, is how well external JavaScript code works inside Visual Composer.

“I have implemented on a couple of sites a header made with Three.JS and it worked quite well, on the first run.”

How Visual Composer Meets the Needs of Web Agency Owner and His Clients

As Oleg in his own words would explain Visual Composer to a friend or a client is: "It’s like creating a website with HTML and CSS, only visually. All the rules still apply, like the 12-row layout, just this time instead of writing the code you create it all visually. And speed-wise, the site is almost just as fast." And that's exactly how he explains it to his clients.

When talking about his clients utilizing the product, he said: "They only have two needs, firstly the site must be done fast, and secondly, the site must be easy to modify so that they don’t need to hire someone to do updates on the site."

"By the way, the other day it was a mini anniversary at our work. 10 websites completed in 3 months."

Lastly, it's important to note that he has a Developers' license (these days, called the Agency License for 1000 websites). The Agency License is $849 a year, which means that making 1000 websites with Visual Composer costs less than $1 per website. Plus, it takes tons of work off of your developer's golden hands, which is priceless, of course.

If you want to try Visual Composer, you can do it for free, or get a one-site license for $49, and access all the Premium features this agency is using for building their clients' sites.

About the Biggest Benefits of Using Visual Composer and Plans for the Future

As the biggest benefit of using Visual Composer, Oleg pointed out that it allowed him to practically skip the prototyping phase and go straight into production, on some projects at least. And, interestingly enough, he came to the same conclusion as Michael Belina, owner of Migman Media.

“Basically, it [Visual Composer] helped me decrease the production on simpler sites by up to 50%.”

By far, Oleg has been most impressed with the ability to create a single style that runs throughout the whole site, Header and Footer editors, and the ability to edit the look of each row and column, depending on what devices are being used, as he highlighted previously.

As for his plans of continuing using Visual Composer for future projects, Oleg said: “I would like to learn React enough to be able to create my own Visual Composer elements. And I would love to find a way to integrate something made with Three.JS into Visual Composer.”

Showcasing how by creating websites for a living, and using the right creative outlet, you get inspired to continuously learn new web design and programming techniques that help you grow as a web creator.

Lastly, Oleg pointed out that it may be a good idea to find a way that users can pass their own layouts to one another, that would engage collaboration between web creators. Or, an alternative to that — creating a place where Visual Composer users could share various layouts, similar to the way self-promotion and social networking platforms like Behance or Dribbble operate.

“Other than that, thanks for everything and keep up the excellent work.”

Ending Thoughts

On our last conversation with Oleg, he revealed: “The other day it was a mini anniversary at our work — 10 websites completed in 3 months. We couldn’t have done it without Visual Composer”.

Oleg's story is inspiring, and it's clear that he has succeeded by using the right tools to get there. You can also achieve success like Oleg by working smarter, not harder (as cliché as that might sound, but the Visual Composer web creators continue to prove right), and customize your websites to your clients' wildest desires, without any hiccups along the way.

The post How Web Creators Made 10 Websites in 3 Months Using Visual Composer appeared first on Visual Composer Website Builder.

How Visual Composer Makes You A Better Web Creator: Migman Media

Visual Composer Staff — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 14:50:57 +0000

In our first case study focusing on showcasing how Visual Composer is used by web creators, we are spotlighting the self-proclaimed biggest fan of the product, Michael Bellina of the New Jersey-based Migman Media.

Michael is the owner and head of a small agency consisting of himself and a handful of contractors. Together they work with a variety of businesses and web development is definitely one of their core services (others consist of SEO, digital marketing and just being the overall tech guy to their clients).

Michael shared his experience of running a successful web agency, which helped to provide valuable insights for those considering starting their own business. Read the full version of the interview or watch the main point of the interview below.

About The Migman Media Agency Business Model

The creator behind Migman Media, Michael Bellina, has over 20 years of experience in successfully developing and promoting websites. Migman Media is a digital marketing agency that helps its clients stand out by providing them with websites and digital marketing campaigns that clearly illustrate their value, show off what they do best while also helping them get exposure in front of potential customers.

His workflow starts by wireframing a project out, adding the graphic designs, designed by his in-house designer, putting it together, and having a site wrapped up until lunchtime. As with the “old way” (before Visual Composer) it would take him a day and a half at least. Now he uses Visual Composer on all his clients' sites and agrees that it's a real time-saver to his business.

Visual Composer allows me to work at least 30% faster and deliver a website to a client until lunchtime.

About The Migman Media Agency Customer Base

The client base of Migman Media is very broad. They focus mostly on business-to-consumer (B2C) customers ranging from the health and medical field to the trade industry, and everything in between.

More recently Michael has found his niche in the landscaping field, because of its incredible artistry, and visual appeal. And, although all the landscaping field clients do the same thing - each project is completely unique. Proving that sometimes, our ideals clients find us, not the other way around. And the only way to do so is by exploring the market and not shying away from new opportunities.

He also discovers new opportunities through word-of-mouth and previous client referral. Hence why he always opts to select clients by a first-come-first-served principle, and not work with competing clients. Demonstrating a commendable work ethic anyone can salute.

As his previous clients see him as the do-it-all tech guy, they continue to return to him with all questions tech-related. More reasons why he hires help to do more work, more efficiently.

How Visual Composer Benefits And Increases Production Turnaround For Migman Media

Before Michael discovered Visual Composer, he was using Div tags, Classes, and CSS. Now he just drag-and-drops the necessary elements where needed, which has made his life a lot easier. Plus, it's also made website development so much quicker.

Not only does he enjoy using the plugin, but it also saves him time when clients demand website elements to look and perform a certain way. Thus why he uses Visual Composer as a design tool as well as a development tool.

I use it on all my clients' sites and it saves me at least half the time.

After the final draft is set and the site is ready to launch, he brings clients through the process of using the editor to do their own maintenance work. From there on, clients can update their sites by themselves, without worrying that they could break something.

Michael highlights that the biggest strength of the editor is being able to change row and column sizes with drag-and-drop. He claims that from competitor products none stand close in compatibility with plugins and solutions that Visual Composer provides. The elements, both native and incorporated, combined with the customization options allow him to fulfill even the most complex of clients' needs.

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How Migman Media Came About Discovering The Power Of Website Builders

Before Michael and his team discovered website builders he used Bootstrap and code HTML and CSS websites by hand. He needed a diverse tool that is both simple and offers a lot of customization options.

The biggest challenge Michael needed to solve before finding a solution is that he needed an easy way for clients to update their websites. Simple enough to understand and use for a non-technical person.

He describes previous solutions as being were very limited. But, since discovering Visual Composer, he thinks it's by far the easiest drag-and-drop WordPress editor. With an WYSIWYG interface easy to understand.

It is the first editor I used that had a good live editor, true to what you see in the editor is what you see on the finished screen.

Before Visual Composer, he has tried using competitor products, as well as used WPBakery Page Builder to build complex sites. But since discovering how quickly and efficiently Visual Composer helps deliver websites to clients, he uses it ever since.

The Migman Media Tested And Trusted Toolkit

The plugins Michael and his team use depend on the client and the complexity of the site. But as all web creators can agree - more plugins, more problems. For example, Micheal shared that he once didn't catch an update fast enough, causing the client site to get hacked.

I use only the top-end plugins & make sure to update regularly.

Michael's usual toolkit consists of Contact Form 7, Duplicator, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Smart Slider 3, Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, and TinyMCE for additional functions. All of which work seamlessly for him with Visual Composer.

As Visual Composer has become more robust, he's started using less CSS. He starts with a base - a basic WordPress template that has no design (Blank Slate By Bryan Hadaway). Then he installs Visual Composer and starts with building the layout. After that point, all the rest is just customizing and adjusting the site to the final product. All with the ease of drag-and-drop.

Final Thoughts

At the end of our conversation, Michael shared his advice for aspiring Web Creators: “Since there are tons of different web development tools to create a website with, you want to be able to make your sites look unique. With the highly-customizable Visual Composer, you can create them fast and save valuable time for clients as well.”

Michael's story is truly inspiring, and we hope you've enjoyed our first of many Web Creator case studies. Now, you know just how successful you can become by using the right tools. Now you can also create websites that you can customize to your heart's content.

Signing off, and see you in the next one!

The post How Visual Composer Makes You A Better Web Creator: Migman Media appeared first on Visual Composer Website Builder.

Porto Theme Integration

Raitis Sevelis — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 15:49:55 +0000

Porto is the highest-rated top WordPress theme available on ThemeForest. Being a perfect solution for both - beginners and professionals, the Porto theme offers more than 120 unique demos for business sites and e-commerce stores.

What makes the Porto theme stand out is powerful theme options and integration with the most advanced WordPress website builder - Visual Composer.

"We could see Visual Composer has high potential compared to Elementor or other builders, especially on user performance and server load response time. We're happy to integrate Visual Composer into our major WordPress theme, Porto!"

Alex, Porto Theme

Porto Theme & Visual Composer

With the Porto theme, you receive a powerful combo. Porto theme options give you all you need to style the overall look of your theme.

When it comes to content, nothing comes close to what you can achieve with Visual Composer.

120+

Porto theme full site templates

28

Unique Porto content elements

40+

Visual Composer elements & templates

Porto Theme Templates

Porto themes offer a wide range of full site templates for business sites, portfolios, landing pages, blogs, and online stores.

For the Visual Composer and Porto theme, a heavy accent has been put into WooCommerce templates.

Browse Popular Porto Templates

Check out the most popular Porto theme templates. All templates come with full Visual Composer Website Builder support.

More Templates

Looking for a WordPress Theme?

Not sure which theme to choose for your new or existing website? We highly recommend giving Porto theme a try. A theme that has all the needed features and is highly appreciated among beginners and professionals.

Get Porto Theme Today

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Audrey Fotografia Case Study: Web Development Checklist in Action

Linda R — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 17:38:57 +0000

The website design and development process is explained through a case study of Audrey Fotografia. A photography site made using smart WordPress solutions that will come in handy also for your website.

Before we unravel the process of what it takes to create a website, let's get to know Adrienn — an event photographer of Audrey Fotografia.

I am Adrienn

The most beautiful moments of life captured in photography will be your special memories. Let me I’ve them to you! Here in Hungary or Europe, I am willing to travel to capture beautiful photos. Wedding photography, maternity, family, and other event photos.

And then, once you are familiar, I will provide you with a web design and development checklist. Plus, you will see its points outlined in action. Feel free to save the list for later and use it to guide your website creation. For yourself or for the client, the essence of the process does not change.

Back to Adrienn!

Story of Adrienn

Adrienn is from Hungary, but as a professional photographer, she is not limited to her home. She is ready to travel to other countries to capture beautiful happenings. Weddings, family portraits, bigger and smaller events are what Adrienn films and photographs.

Having been successful in photography, Adrienn wanted a website to display her photos and videos. Besides, she wanted a site to tell her audience more about herself and that would offer a way to communicate.

Audrey Fotografia Mission

Adrienn was in the same situation as many others dreaming of their website. A place to store creative materials that attract clients. A site that is easy to find in search engines and presents as a photographer's portfolio.

Someone might think that nowadays it is not difficult to show who you are and what you do. Yes, social networks work great, but they are momentary. Have a Facebook page, an Instagram account and you're there, somewhere.

The online environment is changing non-stop. And with it, somewhere, in some way, your story has taken place. Gone. Social networks find it difficult to convey the value that a website provides.

Adrienn saw many reasons why having a website would give her great value. Ease of access, for example. 93% of people’s decisions start with a search engine. A website and a good SEO are key to finding your business.

Having a website guarantees you lasting value. It's a great opportunity to reach new markets and expand the business. Imagine, 93% of your potential customers are out there knocking on your door. You can let them in through the beautiful website.

So, the mission has started, what's the challenge?

Challenge

Adrienn realized that creating a website is a challenge. Will I need to know the coding? What WordPress plugin should I choose to make a multilanguage website? How does SEO optimization work? How will my website look on a mobile device? When to launch my website online?

All of these questions need clear answers. So, this made her look for easy-to-use solutions. And one of them was a drag and drop website builder.

We were happy when Adrienn chose Visual Composer. We knew it would be an exciting visual story. Adrienn has been around creating photo and video memories for others for over a decade. She has a great reputation and countless recommendations. These things deserve to be told to a wider audience. And the website has that power.

Now that you know more about Adrienn and her challenges, I can deliver on my promises.

Web Design and Development Checklist in Action

Further on, you will find out the creation of Adrienn's website. It's a great opportunity to look behind the scene of a WordPress website that turned from an idea into a reality. From inspiration to wireframes, from mockups to functionality.

Website design and development is divided into seven steps:

Gathering information
Planning
Design
Development
SEO research and content writing
Testing, review, and delivery
Maintenance

Each of these steps includes its own guidelines. For example, to gather information, it's necessary to understand the vision of the website owner (your own or client's). To plan, it's essential to understand what experts do you need in the project. These guidelines for each step are what will take you to the next stage of website development.

Let's take a look at each of these seven steps. Both theory and reality.

1. Information Gathering

When starting a project, it is important to know as much information as possible. When it comes to website design, you need to know everything about it. What do you or your client want to see there? What is the purpose of the website? Who is your audience? What are the design requirements and what is the budget?

In practice, these points are summarized in a document called a design brief. The design anatomy can be different, it depends on the project. In the case of the Audrey Fotografia website, the design brief was as follows.

Person Profile

Note that it can also be a company profile when it comes to the company. Your design brief should include a general insight into the client. Knowing the client will give you transparency of what the website should be.

If you make a website for yourself, then highlight the most important thing you want to say. Don't be shy, be proud of your approach.

Talking about herself, Adrienn chose to emphasize her creativity. She positions her personality, who sees the world colorful and adapts to it like a chameleon. This message permeates the entire website. For visitors, this gives the impression of Adrienn as a creative photographer. She is ready to go on adventures with you. And that's exactly what you want from your photographer.

You can read more about Adrienn and her vision.

Project Overview

At this stage, it is important to understand how ambitious the website is. The scope and scale of the project and its deliverables. Are you building a new website or redesigning the existing one? What do you definitely want to include on a website and what would be that you definitely know you don't want to see in it.

At this stage, you should also understand what pages will be needed. Homepage, about me page, what else? We knew about Audrey Fotografia that she would definitely need a gallery to display the photos.

Adrienn is also filming, so there was a need to make room for her videos. An important element is a communication, how will site visitors be able to contact her? A contact form is an answer which in the case of Audrey Fotografia has a special page.

Target Audience

When designing your website, it is important to understand your target audience. Who is your persona? The answer usually can be characterized by demographic data. Knowing the age, gender, and location can tell you a lot. Also psychographics such as media consumption habits, values, and related interests.

If you already have a website with a Google tag in your code, you can use Google Analytics to help you analyze your visitors.

The client should know the target audience best. If there is no research done, you can help with it. Identifying the audience plays a big role to make a suitable website design. In Adrienn's case, having been in the photography business for years, she knows her audience personas to the smallest detail.

This is a piece of a design brief from Adrienn: “As for the age, my target is a really wide range, it's between 20 - 50 years (just engaged, planning a wedding, or already has a family with kids). On the other hand, between 20 - 50, there may be some people who lead small companies, where they need some professional photoshoots of food, accommodations, business portraits, etc.”

Design Requirements

Design requirements are both technical and creative. At this stage, it is important to find out what the customer likes. Or what do you like if you are a website owner? Here you can find inspiration from other websites. This is the case of Audrey Fotografia, where other websites served as design inspiration.

Next, you need to consider all the visual materials that go on the website. If they are videos, what are the formats? If they are professional photos, what are the file formats, and how to submit them? Are there any specific color schemes in the vision for the website? This will help determine the color palette of the site.

Adrienn participates in the creation of beautiful videos. These videos are stored in Vimeo — a video hosting and sharing platform. It would be a bit foolish to put large video files on a website. So the solution is simple. The videos that you can see on the Audrey Fotografia site come via the Visual Composer element for Vimeo. This keeps the website light and does not affect its performance.

Budget

Understanding the cost of a website is an important factor. There may be cases where the desired result is too expensive. In that case, you have to look for an alternative. A good way to save is to make your own website. Nowadays there are handy tools that make this process many times easier.

These would then be the main factors in gathering information. A process that may seem time-consuming at first, but when done, so useful. Let's go further and look at the planning.

2. Planning

When planning a website, it is important to identify everyone involved. In agencies, this is a division into departments, which can be a marketing team, designers, and developers. There are projects that don't need that much involved.

The same person can do both, design and development. If you make a website yourself, then you can write and insert the content. On the WordPress platform, a DIY website is possible due to the offer of many plugins.

The Audrey Fotografia project involved both the designer and the developer, as well as Adrienn herself. She took care of the copywriting. Adrienn herself also translated texts from English into Hungarian and added them to the website using the TranslatePress multilanguage plugin.

Continuing with plugins, it is important to understand at the planning stage what tools and services will you need. WordPress offers a myriad of plugins that provide functionality for your website. Plugins serve as helpers in the page production process itself. For example, with a drag and drop builder, you can build your site without knowing a single line of code.

Returning to planning, when you know all the parties involved, it is necessary to plan the work. Who and when works at a design, who at copywriting. Who participates in the development process, and who installs the necessary plugins.

When that's done, it's time for the most beautiful moment of website creation — web design.

3. Design

Taking into account all the information gathered in the previous stages, it is time to start working on the website design. At this stage, the designer (or you with design thinking) starts working on sketching. As part of this process, you create so-called wireframes.

As you can see in the example above, the design wireframe sketch of the Audry Fotografia website provides spaces that will be filled with a colorful design. And not only. Empty spaces provide their own order. A place for a logo and a menu. Space for the gallery, page titles, and other attributes.

The design of the Audrey Fotografia website was made by a designer from the Visual Composer team. The designer loves to use the digital design toolkit Sketch in his work. Both making wireframes, prototypes, and actual web page designs.

" I have been using Sketch for 3 years. It’s a remarkable product design tool. The Sketch is a vector-based design editor and when it came out first in 2010 it completely changed the interface design industry. The journey is remarkable, it’s easy to use, it is vector-based improves my workflow."

Rohan Rahian

Designer, Visual Composer

Once there is a wireframe ready and you have the approval, follow the next step. The website visualization. Known in the design environment as a mockup that looks more like a finished product or prototype.

The Audrey Fotografia website design mockup was created based on all the information and assets obtained. Image galleries, videos, descriptions, and other features such as additional language.

In terms of content. As far as final copywriting is not yet available at this stage, then in practice, the mockups contain text placeholders. In other words: Filler text or Lorem Ipsum shares some characteristics of a real written text but is random.

So, we have reached a transition from the designer's contribution to the site's developers. Once the final website design has been received, the developers can start working on the development of the page. This often means that each attribute is assigned a function. With the help of code (CSS, HTML, JavaScript) or a WordPress plugin.

4. Site Development

The development process begins with understanding if the front-end and/or the back-end developers are needed. Next, developers need to evaluate every detail of the website design and decide how to give it functionality.

The first is the staging setup. This is where a website develops before it is launched online. The staging environment is no different from the usual dashboard in WordPress. This is followed by theme installation — activation and setup.

When you have a WordPress theme and environment to build a website, it's time to get plugins. WordPress offers a rich library of plugins for all needs and purposes. As one of the first that should be installed is the security and anti-spam plugin. This will make sure to protect your website from rogues. The Audrey Fotografia page is protected by the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin.

Next in line is Yoast. This is definitely the must SEO plugin to guide you through the best practices in writing SEO-optimized content. Yoast is also a good friend to the Google search engine. Notes were taken!

Continuing on as the next in line I would like to put a website builder. WordPress is simple with plugins. But too many plugins mean a slow website. Therefore, the choice is in favor of a page builder, which allows you to create websites of various categories in a convenient drag and drop manner.

What's more, a website builder like Visual Composer offers 350+ elements, templates, and 3rd party integrations, so you can create a site without extra plugins. Like a contact form, for example. Visual Composer offers a simple contact form element inside the editor (Visual Composer Hub), so you won't have to get an extra plugin for that.

In addition to the above, the Audrey Fotografia website also uses a plugin that allows you to broadcast the page in several languages. The TranslatePress multilanguage plugin is easy to use and stands out with its simple but powerful interface.

Remember, this is a list of plugins used to make the www.audrey-fotografia.hu website. Your project may need something else, some additional plugins.

Akismet Anti-Spam
Visual Composer Website Builder
Bluehost
Complianz | GDPR/CCPA Cookie
Consent
TranslatePress - Multilingual
Yoast SEO

During development, it is important to adapt these plugins to your needs. Put settings to suit the purpose, essence, and focus of the website.

Looking at the Audrey Fotografia website, we see the following features and effects. Video background, for example. It is made using the Visual Composer element: Video Background. It is set to start playing automatically once a visitor lands on the homepage.

Such a visual solution attracts glances and creates dynamism. It must be said that such a solution is not the best on a mobile device, so there you will see a background image instead of the video. Why not the best? Because it affects the mobile user experience.

Other things you see on the site are also made with Visual Composer. Page layout, header, footer, and post grid that displays photos. All this is possible without knowledge of the code. But with a little input from you, finding out the features offered by the plugin.

At the end of the development phase, I would like to highlight an important point that should be made by everyone who owns a website. Adding a Google Tag (and Facebook pixel) to the site. It is crucial for marketing activities. Adding the piece of code can be a little scary but it isn't. Sure, you can do that in the WordPress back-end but why choose the scary path.

You can add these codes via the Visual Composer front-end editor. All it takes to insert the code snippet via Visual Composer Dashboard — CSS & JavaScript editor. As handy as it is, Visual Composer has Insights that will tell you what you can improve on your page. Forgot to add an ALT tag to the photo? It will be captured and notified to you. The same is with the Google Analytics tag.

5. SEO Research and Content Writing

We all know that content is a king. The judge of good content is Google. Keyword research is the key to success. It will help determine what content will be best for your website to meet SEO standards. Good SEO also means that your website can be easily found. So think about what keywords you want to be found for.

In the case of Audrey Fotografia, the following tools were used to help with both SEO optimization and content writing.

SEMrush — a popular SEO tool that specializes in keyword research, competitor analysis, and Google Ad campaign optimization.
Google Keyword Planner — lets you discover new keyword ideas for your content and campaigns.
AnswerThePublic — a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud.
Grammarly — a writing assistant that goes deeper than grammar to offer you comprehensive writing feedback.

As Audrey Fotografia's website is bilingual and the audience is divided into several more, keyword research was a challenge. But anything is possible. Content in both English and Hungarian is aligned to the best SEO standards. All with the tools mentioned above.

6. Testing, Review, and Delivery

This is the final stage (before the maintenance), which is still under development, but with everyone involved. Activating the SSL certification, testing the contact form functionality. Checking the responsiveness and how the website looks in multiple web browsers.

Once again, take a look at Yoast snippets, page titles and re-read the final version of the text. Evaluate performance, speed, and overall functionality. Make sure all links are working and there are no errors found. Errors can happen and therefore it is important to have a 404 error page that you plan in the planning stage.

7. Maintenance

Maintenance is not really part of the web design and development checklist, but it should be mentioned. It is an important part of a website. After web design, development, and content, a website is online. What now?

What happens if you change your address? What if you want to add new photos to the gallery? You need to maintain it. Monitor your website to be an evergreen platform.

Again, I want to emphasize Visual Composer, because it makes it very easy to edit site content. Add photos, update texts, whatever needs to be changed.

Summary

The website design and development process are extensive, but following the instructions, it goes smoothly. The key is to plan and process the available information wisely.

Now Adrienn owns a beautiful website that works as a representative portfolio. The website can be easily found by niche keywords on Google and other search engines. And more clients mean more beautiful photography, which leads to a successful career.

I hope you were inspired to create a beautiful website. For yourself or your customers — design it wisely.

Start Your Project with Visual Composer

The post Audrey Fotografia Case Study: Web Development Checklist in Action appeared first on Visual Composer Website Builder.

Case Study: How WebKitty Managed to Grow Their Business

Linda R — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 17:52:34 +0000

WebKitty is a team of web designers who collaborate with professionals in the media and creative marketing industry. Through such collaboration, they present small and medium-sized businesses with ways to strengthen their online presence. Earlier this year, the company discovered that Visual Composer made the process of web design user-friendly. Further, it also minimized the time usually needed to produce a basic website.

After using a website builder for several days, WebKitty grew a fondness for the platform and purchased the Developers license shortly afterward. Some of the options that really made web design easier and faster to build were the ability to view the mobile version and switching device types for each element.

WebKitty Chooses Visual Composer Developers License

To create a product landing page, WebKitty charges from $500 to $3,800, based on the work scope and functionalities required. With the assistance of Visual Composer, they can build cost-effective sites and offer relevant online marketing services (with assistance from creative and local marketing partners), including:

Social Media Marketing
Branding
Software and Mobile App Solutions
SEO Services

The original website I produced using Visual Composer was for WebKitty, which impressed me from the get-go. Each element would have warranted manual coding, but instead, I achieved everything I needed to do through the web builder’s hub directly. I liked the option to use basic responsive elements (such as animated content and hover effects). Its capacity to hastily produce mobile-friendly versions of every page simplified my job. When I purchased the Developers License, I watched the magic happen.

Analyn Braza-Stull

Web Designer and Founder

Something special happened, indeed! WebKitty grew from helping 5 monthly clients to as many as 20+! Clients not only receive quality websites, great customer service, but also a one-stop shop for digital marketing services as well.

What they enjoy most of all is their initial call with the client to learn more about their company, their competition, what has been effective thus far, what hasn’t been, and most importantly, what their business objectives are.

WebKitty’s monthly growth plans and payment programs come with website updates, options to make changes, monthly reporting, strategies for lead generation, social media growth management, and SEO.

I have collaborated with WebKitty on several projects, and was pleased with the services each time! Analyn, the founder of WebKitty, is quite a fast worker, flexible as she is creative, and has offered nothing but end products of the highest quality. The company has competitive pricing, a great work ethic, and a creative state of mind that will make your products stand out.

Ina Mohan, a WebKitty client

www.healthhealinghappiness.com

In Conclusion

With Visual Composer, WebKitty can focus more of their time on nurturing their customers, building relationships, and co-creating with other creatives to support growing businesses.

The Visual Composer Developer license offers countless approaches to create a variety of website solutions. It provides the ability to create an unlimited number of websites, complemented by benefits such as excellent customer support, regular updates and features that impress every time.

Get Started With Visual Composer Premium

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Case Study: Cambrionix Website Development

Linda R — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 10:53:04 +0000

Cambrionix is a company that provides solutions for better mobile device management. Their website www.cambrionix.com was recently re-designed by the Elsey Adcock Design agency. A crucial part of the website development was the use of Visual Composer Website Builder that helped the agency create custom projects and pass the Cambrionix team an easily manageable website.

Overview

After building the business successfully for several years Cambrionix embarked on a new phase of growth marked by a complete rebrand in 2018. Elsey Adcock Design (EAD) was commissioned to provide a full package of design services to fulfill their objective. Working with the Cambrionix marketing team, EAD produced the new brand to work across products, sales materials, promotions and designed a new website.

Coming at the end of the rebranding exercise, consideration had already been given to how elements of the design would work digitally. This made the process of designing and building the website relatively straightforward.

Aims and Objectives

Cambrionix already had a functional website in place that had performed well for them up to this point. However, the revised marketing strategy required a new direction, moving away from straight-forward factual content to a more informal structure promoting the new clear message; Charge, Connect, Manage.

In addition to presenting the new vision, other features were requested, including:

A contemporary, responsive design based on the new brand;
A clear user journey;
The option to promote new or featured products;
A focus on the solutions that the products provide and the market sectors where the product is used;
A product ‘finder’ or the ability to filter products by type and/or market sector;
The ability for customers to buy a product directly from the website;
A strong call to action via the ‘Connect with us’ phrase;
Integration with MailChimp for marketing list building;
A CMS to allow extensive building/editing of content.

While the site needed an element of e-commerce, neither EAD nor the client wanted the site to be an online ‘shop’ as such. The products usually require technical input or special ordering and delivery arrangements, making ordering a complete product installation impractical from a simple store. However, Cambrionix had noted that often customers would buy a single unit for testing prior to purchasing quantities. A solution was needed to bridge this gap.

Process

Stage 1 - Once the brief had been discussed and agreed EAD and Cambrionix carried out research to source stock images for the main home page banner message and other images that might be needed across the site. Product images were supplied by Cambrionix for use on the product pages and as large background images used across the site.

The color palette from the brand guidelines, consisting of a main mid blue, a secondary light blue, and a highlighted yellow, was applied across the site to provide flexible feature panels, buttons, and dividers.

Key decisions were taken to use a bold header with a menu using a large drop-down area to allow links to be grouped with other information, such new products.

The ‘insert here’ concept of the new brand, using square brackets, was integrated into the design. This effect was used to highlight buttons, boxed information and to enhance images.

Product specification features and data is contained in bold, circular graphics using the contrasting blue.

Generally, a full-width approach was adopted for pages with horizontal panels being separated by a diagonal divider, which was part of the brand. These panels can contain either images or solid color backgrounds. Within the panels, information was presented in 2 or 3 column grids, folding down to single column on mobile devices.

Two alternative designs were put forward for consideration. These were built and presented using Adobe XD as online prototypes to help demonstrate how the site would function on desktop and mobile devices. These concepts were developed into a final approved version which set the principals for the build.

Stage 2 – Based on the approved prototype EAD commenced the working prototype build, installing WordPress on a test server, installing software tools, building the theme and templates ready for content to be added.

Stage 3 – The responsibility for adding content was split between the Cambrionix marketing team and EAD. This was a useful exercise for the team to learn how the system operated and familiarise themselves with templates, elements, and processes associated with managing the site.

Stage 4 – Once complete, the content was reviewed and optimized for search engines and the site was tested and launched.

Solution

The existing Cambrionix website was built on the WordPress platform, so the staff was already familiar with the workings of back-end administration of the site. As the marketing team would be running the site from launch it was important to provide tools to allow the site to be managed easily while maintaining the other objectives. EAD used Visual Composer to build the theme, allowing complex templates and elements to be configured ready for staff administration from the start. Visual Composer fitted the project perfectly as it allowed to continue a flexible development of the design as we went forward.

Other software was deployed for key functions across the site. Max Mega Menu was used for the large menus allowing the Visual Composer widget to place styles content in the menu areas. Content Views provided the flexible post and list grids for products and other information, using its filtering tools to build product finder layouts in the site and the menu. Gravity Forms was used to build forms and integrate with MailChimp, combining GDPR notices and links to privacy information.

After looking at e-commerce solutions, it was decided to use Shopify. EAD used Shopify Buy Buttons to integrate products into the WordPress site seamlessly. This solution provides product display with add to cart buttons, related products, a discrete shopping cart and checkout, all without leaving the main website.

Shopify also affords the advantages of a robust, secure e-commerce platform to process international transactions, order processing, stock and user management. Part of the Shopify store allows registered users to access software downloads and user guides.

All other content is built using Visual Composer elements, global templates and custom CSS.

Results

This website was a crucial part of the rebrand of Cambrionix, being the prime focus of their customers internationally and the source of their product and support inquiries. As such, it was deemed a success in bringing the new brand, colors, and ethos to the fore, with positive feedback from Cambrionix customers.

It provides the platform for the marketing team at Cambrionix to build the brand through future promotions and new products, while providing customer loyalty features, such as registered user areas, customer downloads, support, and email marketing.

The whole project was completed within a 4 month period at the end of 2018, with the website production carried out over 6 weeks, going live in January 2019.

The website can be viewed at www.cambrionix.com

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Case Study: How Visual Composer Premium Helps MADDL Clients

Linda R — Thu, 30 May 2019 08:11:03 +0000

MADDL is a multi-project web agency that focuses on eCommerce, websites, and web advertising. They came to Visual Composer searching for an easy-to-use tool for their clients, and they found that and more. Check out how Maddl used Visual Composer Premium to create a hotel website for their client.

About MADDL

Maddl deals with web marketing services, specializing in web design and user experience. Their core business is mainly represented by the creation and management of websites and the creation and maintenance of e-commerce. Maddl programs in PHP and develops on the best open source platforms, for example, WordPress with WooCommerce.

In order to provide a user-friendly website editing options, earlier this year, Maddl bought a Visual Composer Developer license and started to create websites for their clients using our Premium website builder. Easy to understand front-end editor is a great way of how Maddl agency compliments their custom projects. Their customers can easily manage the content of the website even after the agency has delivered it to the client.

Let's see how Maddl agency is implementing the use of Visual Composer Website Builder by putting emphasis on one of their web project, a hotel website lesilve.it.

We used to build custom-looking pages almost from scratch, creating custom code. The website lesilve.it, for example, was entirely made from scratch but thanks to Visual Composer Premium, we didn't have to worry about the pages, posts, custom code corrections and other things, instead, it was done quickly via using Visual Composer. That's why it is a good idea to have some support tools available that can reduce stress and absorb some of the workloads, rather than forcing you to understand everything.

Michele Abis

CEO, MADDL

In light of all this, we have to talk about the website of the Hotel Resort Le Silve di Armenzano, in Assisi, a tourist destination of international renown. The hotel staff is more than satisfied with the management of the lesilve.it website, through the use of the Visual Composer Premium builder.

Use of Visual Composer Hub

Let's start with the Visual Composer Hub, a series of multiple components that help you create pages, posts, content such as maps, boxes, price grids, testimonials, elements, images, etc., in a simple and dynamic way.

In the sample above is the homepage, where we have created several sections that refer to the internal pages that most interest the customer and users. Thanks to the 'button' element we were able to create a dynamic button with an easy to customize animated mouse-in effect. Also thumbs up for a permalink, the builder automatically creates the script for what you need; if for example, the click of the button must correspond to a call, you will only have to enter the phone number and the script is automatically generated for you.

The same goes for Google maps, videos, social network posts, etc.

Further on, the focus goes on the footer and pre-footer that is generated largely by the backend but the simplicity and harmony that the builder generates are not obvious, it is wonderful. Here is a site element that the website builder has allowed us to create for the booking engine. When a user clicks on the 'Book now' button, an on-click online booking form appears which after entering the required fields, will send you to the hotel reservation manager.

Important is to mention the ease with which hotel staff in charge of managing and inserting content on the website, creates new promotions and offers. Thanks to the elements of the website builder, the hotel website is consistent and responsive in a simple and immediate way.

Below you can see how the hotel page content is being updated via front-end editor. You simply click on wherever you want to edit a new information, and simply customize texts, images, or other content fields.

Verdict

In conclusion, here is a feedback from the hotel owners: "With the new website and thanks to the simplicity and completeness of Visual Composer, we were able to optimize the conversion rate, organic traffic and direct bookings of lesilve.it."

As an experienced web agency, we suggest you to try Visual Composer Premium for both, the price ($49 per single site is very little), and for the many features constantly updated. Furthermore, Visual Composer support is exceptional, in a few hours you will receive an answer to your issue. What can we say, seeing is believing - try Visual Composer Premium now.

For all websites, dynamic and eCommerce, created on the WordPress platform, we needed to use a fast loading builder, that is easy to use not only for developers but above all for the final customer, the user who has no coding knowledge. Before Visual Composer, we tried two other site builders for WordPress but were disappointed by the various bugs encountered and the slow assistance. Today, thanks to the easy-to-use website builder and a brief training we provide to our customers, we have satisfied and enthusiastic clients who independently are managing our created website's content.

Dario Di Lascio

Digital Strategist, MADDL

I hope you enjoyed reading the case study of how Maddl agency uses Visual Composer in order to make their clients' life easier. Maddl is one of our many beloved clients who is combining their own knowledge and expertise together with our powerful plugin. Le Silve hotel site is one of many beautiful websites created by Maddl. The agency has also produced websites for other areas, such as educational institutions, catering services, various government organizations and many others (tavoloapolidia.org, cadmos.it, motomacellaio.it, and more).

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Kinsta Case Study: Performance and Visual Composer

Linda R — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 12:07:16 +0000

Many of our users have asked us to suggest the hosting services that are closely associated with Visual Composer Website Builder and WordPress in general. WordPress and its surrounded plugins are a niche community and not every hosting company focuses on that.

Taking into account that WordPress means unique nuances, it is important to make sure you put your beloved website in hands of a secure and fast web hosting that speaks in the same language. In WordPress language!

This article is not a coincidence, Kinsta is one of the rare hosting services that speak in WordPress. So we wanted to test it out on our own, building one of our test projects using Visual Composer Website Builder and fast-forward hosting provider Kinsta.

About Kinsta

Kinsta is one of the well-known WordPress-managed hosting companies that stands out of its performance and speed. And the fact that it is exclusively powered by the Google Cloud platform is well promising.

Kinsta positions itself as a premium WordPress hosting for every kind of business size - small or big, you will be taken care of. Continuing, Kinsta states the following features as its core basis:

Fully managed hosting service;
Secure like Fort Knox (that's an army post in the United States);
Free migrations;
Ultimate speed;
Daily backups;
Free SSL certificates;
Staging environment;
Google Cloud Platform.

Let’s see how well these and other Kinsta features perform accompany with Visual Composer Website Builder. To do so, our developers took several performance tests to see how quickly the website made in Visual Compose loads with Kinsta.

But just before we start, let me summarize the outcome in two words - Kinsta impresses!

Kinsta Performance, Speed, and Capacity

Kinsta performance tests were carried by our back-end developers who tested its speed, capacity, compatibility, and other elements that are important to determine the union of a website and hosting. The tests were performed using the following components:

WordPress 5.0.3 (open source software);
PHP 7.3 (scripting language);
Visual Composer Website Builder 12.0 (drag and drop website builder for WordPress);
Kinsta (managed WordPress hosting);
Other WordPress plugins (WooCommerce, Gutenberg).

Here you can find out what exactly was tested and what the test results were, looking at Visual Composer and Kinsta hosting compatibility.

System Status: Passed

After setting up and running a site built in Visual Composer Website Builder, we checked the System Status in order to see if Kinsta is in compliance with our requirements. Visual Composer Global Settings are for tracking configurations and we were delighted to see that Kinsta shows great results passing all needed requirements.

New Plugin Updates: Passed

Our website hosted by Kinsta was originally developed using Visual Composer Website Builder version 11.0. At the time of its creation, Visual Composer released a new update - perfect moment to test how Kinsta copes with a transition in between plugin updates.

In addition to Block Templates, which was launched with update 12.0, the focus was also on speeding up the editor’s load time. In tandem with Visual Composer and Kinsta hosting, it was achieved that page saving in the editor beats up the norms.

Third-Party Plugins

Visual Composer Website Builder is compatible with plentiful of well-known WordPress plugins. The compatibility program is on demand, new third-party compatibility elements join to the library constantly.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular third-party plugins used to accompany with our website builder. So it was important for us to check how the WooCommerce elements work when hosted by Kinsta.

To test Kinsta's performance, we created several product pages, cart content, related products, and other e-commerce site pages. Test results showed that everything worked well, pages loaded fast enough.

Additionally, we tested other third-party plugins whose compatibility elements are included in our asset library. Caldera Forms, Envira Gallery, Gutenberg, and others - all of them lit up the green light, marking compatibility with the pair of Kinsta and Visual Composer Website Builder.

Assets Download Time: Less Than 5 Seconds

Our website builder contains a lot of ready-made elements and templates that can be downloaded from the online marketplace (Visual Composer Hub). The same as our users, we at Visual Composer use these assets to create our site pages.

So, we wanted to see how long it takes for Kinsta to download elements and templates from the Visual Composer Hub. The results show that the average download speed was under five seconds. It was less for downloading elements, which makes sense because of templates containing more data. However, it is above the average speed, so this is a great result.

Number of Saved Templates

The pair - Visual Composer and Kinsta hosting managed to save more than 15 templates in one page. In practice, there would be fewer assets needed when building a website, but since we are testing Kinsta’s capabilities, we made greater demands. And again, it surprised us with its capacity.

Kinsta & Visual Composer Features

Visual Composer Website Builder greatest asset is its powerful features. When it comes to choosing the right hosting service, we make sure it will complement our best assets with the speed and extra security.

Although all 100+ features were tested, our developers paid special attention to the most powerful ones:

Header, Footer, Sidebar editor;
Global Templates;
Export/Import Templates;
Global Custom CSS and JavaScript.

It was pleasant to see that the functionality works well in details. All major features performed in its best self. Additional components like the Posts Grid performed smoothly, featured images in posts grids updated automatically. All aspects were taken care of which was a nice experience.

Conclusion

Kinsta itself is a great hosting service. Their outstanding features and support (real WordPress experts) make sure you have a great experience with Kinsta.

Kinsta as managed WordPress hosting gets thumbs up! It takes care of compatibility, security and overall community standards.

Kinsta in duo with Visual Composer gets double thumbs up! It is a great match in everything we managed to test. We definitely recommend Kinsta as fast, secure and friendly hosting for your WordPress site that’s made using Visual Composer Website Builder!

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The post Kinsta Case Study: Performance and Visual Composer appeared first on Visual Composer Website Builder.