iThemes Builder is designed to let you create WordPress sites quickly and easily by creating your own layouts. Builder was created because the iThemes founders we were tired of the way website templates used to work. Builder lets you make your own website templates in seconds, without touching any code.

Builder lets you build great-looking websites from scratch, or you can chose from their many child themes, which provide structure, typography, and a range of color palettes to get you started. As I place a lot of importance on ease-of use (both on the back-end and website front-end) when reviewing WordPress themes and frameworks, I decided to demo Builder without reading or viewing any documentation or tutorials (although iThemes does provide plenty of documentation).

The heart of Builder is the powerful layout engine. The Layout panel in WordPress Admin consists of ‘Layout’ and ‘View’ tabs (scroll down for a screen shot). The Layout tab lets you create different layout designs, and the View tab lets you chose where on your site to display each layout (for example, on your home page, on category pages, on archives, etc.). This makes it easy to have completely different page layouts on different parts of your website. Page layouts are created by choosing from several modules, which you select from a drop-down box. The modules includes header, images, navigation bars, content areas (with or without sidebars), widget bars, freeform HTML areas, and a footer. You can then modify the settings within each module (for example, you can configure the content module display the sidebar in different location and edit the width).

You can also add what Builder refers to as ‘Extensions’ to layouts. Extensions provide additional code that changes the content, provides additional features, or modifies the styling of the layout. The available extensions include featured image grid & showcase, featured image slider, magazine layout, portfolio layout, and teaser layouts with an image on either the right or the left. The Builder framework includes tooltips and sub-text that gives you additional details about what each extension includes. You can chose which widgets appear under each layout your create, which is a nice feature.

I was able to create a custom homepage layout containing a header, content box, widget box, sidebar, footer and image slider in just a few minutes, although it was pretty basic looking.

Builder’s built-in Style Manager (which is actually a separate plugin designed by iThemes) lets you further customize your site by letting you change the colors, font type, font sizes, background and much more. Style manager is very easy to use and lets you customize most of the important aspects of your site. Builder also includes built-in SEO, and lets you choose between basic and advanced SEO options, and is also compatible with 3rd-party WordPress SEO plugins.

iThemes provides technical support through a support forum, in which they strive to respond to all questions within 1 business day. They answer sales questions through an email contact form on their site. I contacted the iThemes Sales Department a couple times (regarding viewing a couple demos of the WordPress backend of Builder) and they responded very quickly and professionally.

One big downside with Builder is that the price only includes one year of support and updates. While this would be understandable for the base package (Foundation), you would think the Developer and the All-Access Pass would include lifetime support and updates (especially for the prices of them), but they unfortunately don’t. You can, however, use Builder on unlimited amount of sites. Another downside is that (at the time of this review) the child themes available for Builder aren’t overly impressive.

With Builder 3.2, iThemes spent a lot of time digging through the code and ‘trimming away the fat’, which helped increased average load time by 20% and reduce memory usage by 36%.

Out of all the WordPress theme frameworks available, including the popular Thesis and Genesis, Builder is among the easiest to use. While Builder offers the ability for anyone to build their own WordPress based website without needing any coding knowledge or web design experience, the websites you design with it will most likely be pretty basic looking. To really customize your site and build something unique with it, it would really help to know some coding. Builder could be a good option for individuals looking to build personal websites or simple business websites, but people and businesses looking for a more elegant and professional website would probably be better off with a WordPress theme tailored to their industry. That said, Builder can serve as a great starting point for web developers looking to save a lot of time, as it can let you build sites quickly, and you can then add your personal touch to them.

Below are a couple screenshots of the itThemes WordPress themes Builder admin:

Builder is available in 3 different purchase packages, as detailed below: