It’s WordPress Jim, but not as we know it – a brief introductory guide to designing a WordPress website with the Amibe Website Builder.
For anyone familiar with making websites in WordPress, there are a couple of areas to align with to orientate within Amibe.
Let us begin with what is essentially the same.
Media, posts, pages, categories and tags
Media, posts, pages, categories and tags are standard WordPress. So content management – the adding and maintaining website posts and images – is familiar and consistent.
Good news for Contributors, Authors and Editors – the heart of an active website.
There are, in addition, optimization, SEO and security enhancements that improve on website performance.
This is a good place to start when making a website, by getting basic content structures in place.
Navigation
Once content is defined it is possible to implement navigation.
Menus is also a standard WordPress feature (found by navigating to Appearance > Menus), with a few Amibe enhancements.
Using Menus for navigation is not always required, but useful for navigation that repeats in different places and has different layout and formatting.
All good so far – so what’s different?
Themes
The Theme, Customiser and Widget options are replaced in Amibe with layout templates – effectively a visual, drag-and-drop theme builder leveraging the power and versatility of a page builder.
Amibe offers Elementor for this. As arguably the most popular and loved page builder, it is fit for the purpose.
For theme developers, a good working knowledge of Elementor is essential for configuring a website theme in Amibe.
Features of the Customiser can be found in Elementor’s Site Settings, including site-wide styling. Elementor provides a truly WYSIWYG experience for configuring your website design and layout.
Widgets (and so much more) can be found in the Elementor Editor, and can be dragged and dropped wherever needed – in actual pages or in layout templates.
Any custom code that would be added to the functions.php file may be summitted for addition – it will first be check against certain standards before being considered for addition.
Plugins
In Amibe there is an existing, curated list of available Plugins – these are already installed but not necessarily enabled.
Notably different is that new plugins cannot be installed (although recommendations are welcomed for consideration).
The list of available plugins is intended to be among the best options available, covering most of what is required to make a great website.
Hosting and Installation
The Amibe Website Builder is a managed service (SAAS) so an Amibe website is already hosted – all that is required is to point a custom domain to Amibe.
The initial setup is very simple and extremely fast (it takes seconds). Certainly no technical knowledge is required to get started – and no further installation of anything is required.
Enhancements
By default Amibe incorporates essential security, performance and SEO optimisations, that would otherwise require expert experience to install and configure, with advanced configuration options available if required.
Day-to-day maintenance tasks such as regular security updates are all taken care of.
All Amibe websites have visitor analytics integrated into the dashboard right from the initial setup.
Brought together, all these aspects of the Amibe Website Builder help to establish a fully integrated and consist website building experience with a gentler learning curve for advanced functionality, allowing for superior support services by Amibe Experts.