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Impact Page Builder Review

It's still lissowerbutts.com - just not as you know it

Hi – its OK its really me Lis! I just moved the furniture around a bit!  BTW if you are reading this via the RSS feed you may want to click thru as I am talking about the look and feel of this page in this post – you kinda have to be here! Anyway as you might have gathered this post is promoting Impact Page Builder – why? Well because I have building up your trust so that you would buy lots from me and pay for the overseas holiday to somewhere warm!

Well to be honest from what I’ve seen no one makes any serious money promoting stuff that is one off purchases like Impact Page Builder – the market is just too small and  there is no agressive upsell or membership sites – which is where the money really is at!

Anyway getting back to Impact Page Builder. This is a brand new plugin from Eric Hamm – of Frugal Theme fame.  Well its been out a couple of weeks – it took Leo’s newsletter to wake me up to its potential. (If you are not subscribed – you’re an idiot – subscribe).

Impact Page Builder – Key Features

In their own words – IPB allows you to:

Our Template Builder gives you everything you need to create attractive designs quickly and easily. Our real-time interface lets you see your template take shape before your eyes as you make adjustments. Even the code changes you make to a Template’s Custom CSS are reflected instantly.

Each Impact Template has 15 empty Hooks, such as ‘Before Header’, ‘After Sidebar’, ‘In Footer’, etc. You can use these to hold anything from WordPress Widgets to custom Text, HTML & JavaScript.

With WordPress 3.0′s new Custom Menus feature, you can create and use Template-Specific NavBars. Run an unlimited number of interlinked mini-sites with unique navigation from a single domain!

  • Its a plugin – not a theme – Impact works independently of your theme – and therefore works on ANY theme.
  • Impact Page Builder gives you total control and the ability to create page/post templates.  You can create a new template for just one post on your site (as I have done here) – or you can several templates – one for your landing pages, one for your squeeze pages, one for your blogging ramblings.
  • Impact is (mainly – see below) a WYSIWIG page builder – change the layout – the widget areas – the change will reflect on the screen in the same way I understand Headway does.
  • Impact  has a slick download which directs you immediately to the support forums if you have questions or issues – I did have a problem (of my own making) and the support was fast and effective.
  • Unlike many themes and plugins  IPB offers free upgrades for life.

Impact Weaknesses

  • The product is new – I think the Impact Page Builder team will bringing out skins to allow those of us who are design disabled to make a site look good without knowing how to create a design from scratch.  So at  the moment if you are design challenged – you will get something that looks like this page! (And yes I tried using Firebug – but it doesn’t help me very much!).
  • Eric is using eJunkie for IPB’s affiliate program – I personally prefer the idevaffiliate manager which they used for Frugal.
  • The use of custom widgets for each template is going to end up with a LOT of widget areas in your “widgets” menu!

Who is Impact Page Builder For

  • If you are building “supersites” as The Keyword Academy calls them – you need this plugin – it allows you to completely “silo” (as Leo calls it – your site so that every menu and link on a page is relevant to your keyword for that part of the site.
  • If you are developing sites for local businesses – then using this plugin (and the developer’s version allows you to deploy to client’s sites) on top of a basic theme may well give you all the flexibility you need if you know a bit of CSS
  • If you are developing mini-sites which require different pages – such as opt in pages, downloads for products etc etc i.e. if you have started googling “landing pages in WordPress” – then IPB is going to cost you less than those templates – and gives you much much more.

Who Should Give Impact Page Builder A Miss

  • If you are just developing Adsense minisites then you are probably good to go. Its only when you want to start customising parts of your site and/or doing very “special” pages that the value of this product will be obvious.
  • If you a buying it – just to see – don’t –  IPB, like most themes and plugins – does NOT offer a money back guarantee – if you think about it for 5 secs the reason why is obvious. So take the time figure out if you have the need before you buy!
  • If you haven’t got any traffic yet – well the design is pretty irrelevant isn’t it? Build more links first!

Impact Page Builder Template on This Page

Yeah well I never said I was a designer! But what I did was something like this:

  • added a text title;
  • added an image to be used as the overall background;
  • added a widget area below he title area and added a custom menu to it;
  • changed the colours and look of the menu by using custom CSS – hacked from code provided for the purpose in the support area;
  • added another widget area above content and added a big affiliate banner to it;
  • as I am using this template on a post rather than a page my  other plugins included “related posts” and “sexy bookmarks” are still showing  – but nothing from the site’s standard theme (Frugal) is.

So what do you think?  To me IPB is a game changer for the whole paid theme space.  For the same price of a single license of a premium theme (including Thesis and Frugal) you can buy a developers (unlimited) version  the Impact Page Builder plugin ($88) and have way more control than any theme can offer you. To just try it out you are looking at $44 for a single site license (and you can upgrade to the unlimited version by paying the difference later if you wish to). I just hope that Eric manages to get word out and get critical mass in the market  before the inevitable knock-off’s start coming out.


5 replies on “Impact Page Builder Review”

I must confess that my first thought as I saw this blog post was ‘OMG, what has she now done to her poor blog!’ I admit, it has a certain 70s / 80s retro charm, but I wouldn’t count that as a selling point for the plugin! I really clicked back to your homepage just to make sure the design changes hadn’t affected the whole blog … As for the plugin, I re-read your post several time and I still fail to see what for I should spend the $88 or $44, apart of facilitating you a nice vacation on the beach obviously 😉 But then you are already living in warmer country than I do 😉 But then, I am an internet marketers nightmare, I buy hardly anything! Said all this, I am sure the plugin might came in useful for people that need to create a lot of special landing and squeeze pages, as you siad. SY

PS I finally subscribed to Leo’s newsletter / blog, doesn’t make you any money, but I still thank you for the great tip! Not sure how I managed to miss his site until now.

HUMPH goes off to sulk in corner because some Europeans don’t understand cutting edge design when they see it 🙁 You missed Leo – read Leo v.carefully – he’s worth listening to! (and he thinks the plugin is essential for more than just landing pages – think about the customisation of internal links side of it ..)

Hey Lis,

Thanks for the plug. You pretty much covered everything in this review but I think I should add a thing or two more as why I believe that Impact Page Builder would be useful.

Now, this is from a marketer’s perspective but I figure you have more than a few folks who make money selling other people’s shwag so here goes….

Imagine that you have a fitness blog. And on this blog, you have sections that include diet, weight-training, running tips and how to get toned.

…and let’s say that through analytics and testing, you have discovered that your best converting ad goes to a weight loss product. So you put that in the side bar.

…the problem is that people who are interested in your series on HIIT for building muscle will see this ad as well because the side bar is static (it doesn’t change from page to page or category to category).

…Impact Page builder allows you to change the sidebar, header…pretty much anything on a page by page basis.

…so instead of showing the people who aren’t interested in weight loss a product on how to lose weight (but are into HIIT), you can show RELEVANT products on the specific pages that you want.

A website with hundreds of pages can suddenly build templates & show ads that compliment the content of the page. Relevant, highly specific offers will naturally yield better results from a sales perspective.

So, a person comes to your site through organic search for HIIT training and they are met with a Customized header that has the search term in it…navigation that goes to all thing HIIT…a sidebar with an offer that is specific to HIIT and right above the side bar?…an opt-in form that once again uses the verbiage for HIIT training using a white paper on the 10 best programs that use HIIT for the quickest results…..

…its like a mini-site within a more general website.

From a search engine perspective, all navigation points to only things that have to do with HIIT training….the only links entering the main site are “top level”.

At any rate, that is my take on it. I think that any SERIOUS marketer that understand the psychology of selling, who uses the wordpress platform as the advertising medium, and who wants to build a large website and segment the niches and verticals within their chosen market would be STUPID not to, in the very least, give this one a look.

Leo

p.s. It is good to see someone rivaling me in the “best looking wordpress theme” award category.

Yup – I will doing that with some of my older posts around here too – I’ve had a problem for a while with 2 completely different readerships on this site- IPB gives me a way to keep both groups happy!
P.S No one understood Andy Warhol’s paintings when he started either …

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