It’s been a wild and tough journey exploring various website builders. I admit I wasn’t a coding geek or something—just an entrepreneur with an average command of the website design landscape, all thanks to drag-and-drop website builders that I can use with ease.
Today, we’re taking a look at one of my favorite builders of all time: the Oxygen Builder. What’s better? Oxygen released a new update for their builder last October 2020, Oxygen 3.6. Being one of the best out there, I was completely thrilled about this update, and we’ll be exploring them together in this discussion.
What is Oxygen Builder?
First, what is Oxygen Builder? If it’s your first time creating a website and you’re looking for a compelling website builder, fear not, as Oxygen Builder may be the best website creation tool for your needs. I must say I’m quite pressured to be the first one to introduce you to Oxygen Builder, but let’s not waste any time here.
Oxygen Builder is a drag-and-drop type of website builder for WordPress sites. While being exceptionally easy for beginner creators with no coding experience, Oxygen Builder is also expert-friendly, allowing developers to explore without restrictions.
Oxygen Builder is available for a one-time purchase, compared to its subscription-based competitors. I knew when I dropped that $169 that there’s no turning back, and I’m glad that I didn’t because of Oxygen Builder’s boundless capabilities.
A Brief Background About Oxygen Builder
Soflyy built Oxygen Builder in 2016. Pioneered by Louis Reingold, also the founder of WP All Import plugin, Oxygen was the real-life transformation of what he has always wanted to achieve in website creation in his ten years in the industry. This idea gave birth to the reinvention of website builders that offer complete, down-to-the-pixel control.
The best way to introduce you to this fantastic website builder is to enumerate its unique features from its competitors. Personally, these are their features and capabilities that have helped me the most in achieving my website goals:
- Highly customizable breakpoints in multiple devices (desktop and tablet) and different formats (container, portrait, and landscape)
- Responsive control for all CSS properties (trust me, it sounds technical but easy-peasy once you get your hands on the controls!)
- Extensive WooCommerce support features, including style WooCommerce widgets and global WooCommerce styles that most builders don’t have
Allow me to create a separate section for my favorite Oxygen feature. I’ve had a fair share of website builders with performance issues. It was disappointing to discover when I was in the middle of designing a website, only to find it getting slower and slower. I either had to continue working with the builder and endure its slow performance, or find a better builder and waste my progress.
However, I didn’t experience any of these with Oxygen. Its basic page performance, Divception, and SEO performance were excellent without any encounters with slow loading times. Their clean and bloat-free performance was my main turning point to Oxygen.
Oxygen Builder 3.6 New Features
Enough with the past and let’s discuss what you truly came here for: the newly launched updates of Oxygen Builder, which have come far to Oxygen Builder 3.6.
So, let’s keep this short and sweet and proceed with Oxygen Builder 3.6’s new, updated features:
REM Units
Who doesn’t love fluid and flexible website typography? Not me. Em- and rem-based layouts are the future of website topography. It allows creators to scale text up or down without creating inconsistencies in all possible screen orientations of the viewer.
With the Oxygen Builder 3.6, we’re getting rem units, which helps make your design elements more responsive. You can find this option in fields under the unit dropdown.
The root font size of HTML elements is set to a default 16 px, equal to 1 rem. If you set your text’s font size into 2 rems, then this would make their size equivalent to 32 px, and so on.
However, if you want to change the root font size, you can go to Manage > Selectors > Add Selector, type in HTML, and change into your preferred font size from 16 px.
Custom Units and CSS Functions
Aside from experimenting with rem units, Oxygen Builder also facilitates custom units, a feature perfect for developers who don't want to get restricted with font scaling.
You can go further than rem units by setting your unit into “non-unit” in the unit dropdown. Whether your unit is present in Oxygen or not, you can freely use them thanks to this update that many users have been requesting for.
Once you set the unit to non-unit, you can simply type in your chosen unit and preferred calculation in the font size field. You can also utilize CSS functions like clamp[] and calc[], then play with more than one unit.
Client Control
As long as you have access to the website builder, you can tweak any design element however you’d like, but things can get messy if your account has more than one user. Every user in a website builder can have full control and access to making any changes.
In Oxygen Builder 3.6, you can now grant select permissions to other users collaborating in the website creation. If you work closely with a team to design your website or a client’s website, Client Control is the feature you’re definitely looking for that other website builders don’t have yet.
On the Client Control, you can find the Edit Mode where selected users can only work with the plugin in an Edit Only Mode. If you set a specific user into Edit Only Mode, they can’t access the following functionalities:
Looking at these functions, there’s indeed a lot of restrictions to what you can do. I’d probably assign the Edit Only mode to someone concerned with the content per se of my website, but I tend to work with different creators, designers, or developers, so this feature would be more restrictive than helpful.
Thankfully, the Oxygen Builder didn’t wait for their users’ requests as they also served another option for Client Control, the Granular Permissions. In Granular Permissions, you can grant editing access according to the individual user or their role.
Take note that this Edit Mode feature is only available in the Agency version and users who have purchased Oxygen before version 3.0.
Oxygen Builder 3.6: Hit or Miss?
Oxygen proved that it’s not the typical website builder with basic web design features and poof!— There’s your website. With these new updates, they ensured that you could play with your website elements while ensuring you’re driving on the right path, which is truly a hit for all kinds of website creators. If you don’t like to be restricted with web design limitations, like me, the Oxygen Builder version 3.6 would gladly love to break barriers with us to deliver better content than ever.