4 New Improvements to Thrive Themes – March 2020

1. Floating Video

If you already know what Floating Video is, then you're probably fist-pumping the air when you read that title.

If you don't, here's an example. Watch what happens to the video below when the viewer scrolls past it:

See how the video automatically floats into the top left of the screen?

Floating video allows you to neatly push your video to one of the corners of the screen so that it's present while visitors view the rest of your page.

There are paid floating video plugins costing half the price of Thrive Architect dedicated to this one feature... but we've just given it to you at no extra cost, built right into our tools.

Does it help with conversions?

Yes.​

If a visitor lands on a sales page and begins to watch a sales video at the top, what happens when they want to scroll down to find out more about the product?

Your sales video disappears.

With floating video, it neatly floats to the side, allowing the video to still do the heavy lifting while your viewer consumes the rest of the content on the page.

How does Floating Video Work?

Under your video settings, you'll find a new toggle that says 'Sticky Float on Scroll'.

When you toggle this on, a new set of options will appear. Take a look:

You can choose which of the four corners you want your video to float, or you can choose 'keep position'.

Keep Position will orient the video with the top left corner of it's original placement on the page.

You can set the player width in pixels or percentage of viewport, and adjust padding on the two sides closest to your chosen corner.

'Enable Close Button' adds a small cross in the corner of the video so your visitors can close the floating video. Leaving this setting switched off forces floating video at all times.

By default, we've disabled floating video on mobile where screen real estate is sparse, but you can enable it if you please.

Video size and padding options work on cascading responsive views too. That means changes you make to the floating video on tablet view will apply to smaller sizes (mobile) but not larger (desktop). 

This means it's super easy to get floating video just right on all device sizes.

2. New Buttons with Smart Colors and Templates

We've released a subtle technical improvement to buttons... that also comes with 34 new button styles.

Now when you drop a button onto the canvas, it's going to look different out of the box. When you click the style selector, you'll see something new:

From here, it's easy to see which button styles you have saved, and which ones are defaults.

The defaults come in two categories:

What you won't notice at first is what's changed behind the scenes.

New Buttons are now Smart Color enabled. That means that with one click you can set a key color and the button will intelligently adapt.

That means any gradients, borders, hover colors, icon colors, backgrounds and font colors will match your selection.

What's impressive about Smart Color technology is that it intelligently sets shades and tones related to the main color you've chosen. 

If you choose a dark orange, you may see a lighter or less saturated orange used subtly on a border, or an even darker shade on a font. But you won't need to manually set those yourself. The Smart Color algorithm figures it out for you based on your accent color of choice.

Changing Style... Not Content​

Once you drop a new button on the page, you can change the content of the button (text, icon and hyperlinks) and your choices will remain the same while you try out new styles.

Why is this helpful? 

It means you can drop a default button on the page, change the text to say "Get Started" or "Reserve Your Seat" or whatever suits your business, and then cycle through new button styles to see how that same text will look.

So, what does this mean for Thrive Theme Builder?

You might remember that Shapeshift already comes with 5 beautiful homepage designs.

But what if you want to quickly restructure your home page?

What if you want to use the hero section from one template, the testimonial design from another, and the opt-in form from a third template?

Page Blocks make it ridiculously easy to drop entire blocks of pre-built page templates onto the page and change their order.

To access it, open up any landing page template from the Shapeshift set and you'll find this new blue Plus button:

When you click on this [+], a pop-up will open that lets you choose any page block from the entire Shapeshift set.

That's 125 beautiful page blocks. Click the toggle to match to your landing page colors and voila! 

This means you can mix and match blocks from one Shapeshift template to another, and piece together your dream homepage...

...Or About page... or Contact page... whatever you want!

If you're using Shapeshift with Thrive Theme Builder, look for the 3 green blocks above the landing page set. Any templates with those blocks are Page Block enabled.

In order to see the page blocks, make sure to update Thrive Theme Builder, for this go into Appearances >> Themes >> Thrive Theme Builder

4. New Guarantee Box Designs

Are you offering a 30-day Money Back Guarantee on your product?

If not, you should be.

Generous refund policies and guarantees are known to boost your conversion rates by putting your money where your mouth is.

By reducing the risk of dissatisfaction, your customers are far more likely to convert, knowing that if your product isn't a fit for them they can get their money back.

To make it easier for you to flaunt your guarantee on a sales page, we've released 21 new guarantee box designs. Take a look:

Of course, these new designs are editable and our designers have created some eye-catching new seals and ribbon designs too.

The key text areas on these seals are text elements, meaning you can easily change the wording of your guarantee to suit your product.

With one click, you can drop a Guarantee Box right on your sales page.

Not sure where to put them?

Guarantee Boxes are an excellent way to relieve purchase anxiety, so we recommend placing them at the point on the page where your visitors are likely to feel unsure about buying. Usually that means placing them right after your pricing table or the first time you share your product's price.

Here's an example of one of the templates loaded right into this blog post:

Guarantee Boxes are stylized content boxes, and can be found in your Thrive Architect elements panel. Just look for this icon:

Let us know what you think!

What do you think of Floating Video? Think you'll use the new Button Styles?

We love hearing your feedback on our features and your suggestions for new improvements, so please drop a comment below.