With millions of live websites that are active right now, the competition for people’s attention is doubly tight. The number of websites created are increasing day by day but attention spans are getting shorter.
If you’ve browsed through other posts here, I really emphasize the role of regular and relevant content to keep people coming back to your site or at least stay for more than 10 seconds. However, you must also consider the visuals and interactivity of your website. They’re just as important, if not more, because before the content, a visitor sees the design of your website first.
In this post, we’ll explore what you can do to your WordPress site through Toolset to make it more dynamic and enticing for visitors.
What is Toolset?
Toolset is a provider of powerful individual WordPress tools and plugins to make your website more interactive and dynamic. Toolset allows you to skip on the HTML. You can have attractive elements on your site that give your visitors something stimulating to the eyes unique enough to keep their attention—no programmer or developer required. It’s like other page builders, though it is not one itself.
However, Toolset is not limited by the level of convenience they offer. There are also enhancement opportunities (with a little of programming but only where it’s absolutely essential) should you want some more complex features.
Toolset comprises a couple of plugins and features that you can stretch and use for different purposes to the limit of your imagination and design or content ideas.
Features
Toolset carries a suite of tools and plugins to help you customize your website and add elements that would otherwise take so much coding to achieve.
Types
Toolset Types is an overall plugin that lets you create custom post types, taxonomies, and fields. Apart from posts, pages, and media, you can add more post types and fields that are specific to your website. This makes it more organized for you because you can add your own categories and fields.
You can also connect these content types so that related ones will be easy to find, kind of like how we use tags for.
Blocks
Blocks is the plugin responsible for everything that goes on the frontend of your website. This is what the users see when they look at your site when you have blocks set up. With this, you can create lists of content, design pages and archives, and create custom searches, so that relevant types and taxonomies will show up when users search for them.
As the visual aspect of your website, Blocks can make or break your website’s performance. No need to worry about coding though because you can design blocks using WordPress’ Block editor.
Views
Views, or “The Query Builder” of Toolset, allows you to take any information or content from your database and display it on the frontend of your website with your own design. It’s very easy to use even for beginners and without the need for programming.
You simply select the content or type you want to display, apply filters to it, design it with simple HTML (predetermined styles are also available to make it even easier), then it will be displayed on your website. Views can be inserted into pages, templates, and widgets.
Layouts
Do you struggle with Bootstrap? Or maybe you’re not struggling, but could do with something that lets you skip on the headache-inducing CSS and Javascript? Toolset Layouts is a layout-builder that allows you to design based on the Bootstrap grid without fussing with any HTML.
The grid drag and drop editor of this plugin acts as a page builder. Your design will adhere to the size of the screen. The thing about Layouts is it’s responsive, so it’s good to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
Maps
Toolset Maps lets you assign addresses to different users and content types. You simply have to add a custom ‘address’ field to them. Two of the most common ways you can use Maps is to put a single address on the Contact Us page or have search results appear within a map. That’s certainly something your visitors might have never seen before.
Forms
Forms is kind of like an automation system. It allows you to create forms that will be connected to your frontend content. Any user-generated content submitted in the forms will edit and update the content displayed on your website.
This is good for keeping a directory on your site, listings, memberships, etc. Aside from inputting content, you can also manage the existing ones and delete the unnecessary content that’s already displayed. This plugin is available fully on the frontend, so users don’t have to access the admin page of your WordPress site. Truly helpful for membership sites! Though it can’t be done without the help of the next tool.
Access Control
Access Control basically lets you manage users on your site and the content that they have access to. You can hide and show certain content from different people.
You can limit what users can do on your site and give special privileges and permissions to certain users. This extends to the admin area. You can set roles to users and give permissions to specific ones that will be able to make some changes from the admin area.
Module Manager
Modules allow you to use blocks, views, and other elements you’ve already created in other websites that you own. They’re all saved and ready to use whenever you want from the module.
Toolset also has premade ones that can be accessed and downloaded from their module library.
Final Verdict – Is Toolset for You?
There are 8 plugins and tools that Toolset offers right now, but to be honest, the opportunities that Toolset opens up seem only as infinite as your own ideas for your website’s design and functions.
All these plugins are available individually or together. Obviously, it makes more sense to use them together, but also it makes your WordPress more powerful if you take advantage of each tool’s capabilities and functions.
You can really make a unique website with Toolset here. It’s almost impossible to encapsulate it into a single definition. But ultimately, if you ask me, is it worth it? The simple answer is yes.