New LMS Page Builder Demo: Aircraft by LifterLMS

Build beautiful eLearning website homepages, sales pages, and more with the LifterLMS page builder called Aircraft. 

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LMS Page Builder Demo: Aircraft By LifterLMS

Aircraft is a WordPress page builder for LifterLMS that ships as a library of designed block patterns. In this demo, Chris Badgett, Will Middleton, and Kurt Von Ahnen show how to build homepages, course sales pages, about pages, and blog lead magnets in minutes using hero, testimonial, offer-stack, and call-to-action patterns that adapt to any modern block-based theme.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a design template library speeds up building high-converting LMS pages
• How Aircraft works as a native WordPress block pattern library
• How to build a homepage and a course sales page in minutes
• How to redirect a LifterLMS course to a custom sales page and wire the buy button to checkout
• How to use Aircraft patterns inside blog posts for lead magnets and content upgrades

Key Takeaways

• Use Aircraft patterns as a starting point, then customize the content for your niche
• Redirect a LifterLMS course sales page to a custom Aircraft-built page to control the buyer journey
• Save your customized patterns so you can reuse them across the site with one click
• Keep the design job simple. The transformation your course delivers is the real product
• Get Aircraft in the Universe or Infinity bundle if you also want Sky Pilot, ecommerce, and email marketing tools

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Welcome To The Aircraft LMS Page Builder Demo

Chris Badgett: We are live. I want to welcome you to this Aircraft demo. Aircraft is a new LMS page builder. It works great with LifterLMS, but it also works with any theme that is modern and block-based. We are going to do some demos for you today. You are going to learn how to build beautiful e-learning websites, sales pages, homepages, and more with LifterLMS Aircraft, our page builder, all without being a designer or being a WordPress block editor expert. We have got a beautiful design template library to help you build your web pages faster, and I am excited to get into it with you today.

I am Chris from LifterLMS. We have Will Middleton and Kurt Von Ahnen in the house. This is going to be an interactive session, so if you have questions wherever you are watching this, just drop a comment. We will see it and we will take questions as we go. If you registered for this training, you will get an email about the replay later.

Why You Need A Page Builder For Your LMS Website

Chris Badgett: Why do you even need a page builder? What is wrong with just starting with a blank page and building a web page? Two things. One, it takes a long time. What a page builder can do is provide speed with templates, even if you are not a designer. It can give you great design.

Everybody has opinions about design. Everybody has design preferences. But design is actually a really elusive animal. Creating great design is challenging. Creating great design that appeals to a broad audience, even within your niche, is hard. People have different color and font preferences. Design is a whole universe of challenges.

One of the things you can do is use a page builder like Aircraft with design templates to level up and speed up the output of great-looking web pages, parts of pages, and entire pages. My favorite place to start is either the homepage or a sales page for a course or membership, particularly if you are pre-selling the offer to make sure you have interested people before committing to actually creating the training.

What Aircraft Includes Out Of The Box

Chris Badgett: Aircraft is an add-on. It is available on our website in the software add-ons area. What we have done is broken down some of the highest converting, generally accepted, great design components that make up a website, particularly a learning management website. You can crank out designs quickly with calls to action, meet-the-instructor sections, trusted-by logos, and hero areas.

The hero area is the welcome. It is the first impression people have when they visit a web page. It is the common layout for homepages and sales pages. Testimonials are huge. Building all these little components of head shots, name, role, testimonial content, five stars, then boxing them and spacing them correctly can happen in seconds with a page builder like Aircraft.

Aircraft is also available in the Universe bundle and the Infinity bundle. If you ever want to know which LifterLMS products are included in which bundles, look at the plan comparison area. Aircraft is in the Universe and Infinity bundles. You can also get it as an individual add-on if you just want this one piece.

Where WordPress Fits In The Page Builder Ecosystem

Chris Badgett: I wanted to have a discussion about the page builder ecosystem in WordPress. WordPress itself, particularly with the block editor and full site editing, is a page builder. Aircraft sits on top of WordPress without leaving it. It brings a different interface and lets you choose great layouts and designs from a design template library.

About seven years ago, I started using Beaver Builder as a page builder because I realized I was not a great designer. Beaver Builder made it easy to put together complex web pages with good-looking designs. They had design templates like Aircraft does now, and I really enjoyed it.

But over time, I gravitated back toward using WordPress natively. One reason is performance and speed. The less tools you bring in from outside, the faster your website is. But also, in my time in business and website design, I want the simplest solution to drive business results, conversions, grow the email list, and create sales. Staying within WordPress itself is actually the simplest way to use WordPress.

When To Use A Page Builder Versus Native WordPress

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, like you mentioned, there is a bunch of page builders out there. I have got customers that are on Divi. I have got a customer that is still on Beaver Builder. Got a ton of folks in Elementor, which I still subscribe to and use. But a lot of my projects lately have been based in Gutenberg or in the full site editor.

It comes down to use case. Who is my client and what do they intend to do with the website? To answer James’s question, yes Aircraft is different than Sky Pilot. Every site needs a theme, but then there are builder tools that you put on top of the theme. Aircraft is a builder, and it works with other themes than just Sky Pilot.

When you have plug-and-play assets like you get with Elementor, you can go to the templates area, find a landing page, find a site kit, take a piece of a site kit, rebrand it for yourself. You do not have to make everything from scratch. In Kadence or Astra, you can take a starter site and tweak it. Aircraft with Sky Pilot does a very similar thing. I can take all of these assets, employ them, and tweak them as I need them.

Sometimes those tools help speed the process or come to a minimal viable product more quickly. But when I design for clients, the responsibility falls on me to make sure the client knows how to use those tools and understands the ongoing maintenance, updates, and subscriptions. A lot of my projects lately have been staying with Gutenberg, staying simple, not adding extra tools that do not necessarily need to be there.

The Elementor Versus Aircraft Fit For Different Kinds Of Users

Will Middleton: People who may have seen me and Kurt before, we talk a lot about Elementor. I make content on YouTube all the time about LifterLMS and Elementor. I see Elementor as a great fit for people who are trying to spend a lot of time building their sites. Last weekend I spent six hours working on my blog page just because it is fun for me to play around with the colors, border radius, and shadows. I am having fun investing time into the platform.

But if you are looking for something just to create the site, you are looking for it fast, and you are focused on the business, not spending six hours on the weekend designing your blog page, then the core WordPress is going to be a great fit for you. Especially with the Aircraft add-on allowing you to build pages in like 30 seconds. Beautiful page already designed, switch out your pictures, walk away. If you are looking for that kind of experience where you can get a great look out of the box, I like Aircraft.

A Tour Of The Homepage Rows Aircraft Ships With

Chris Badgett: I am going to get into the show and tell part. We have got this site up. You can actually buy one of these for a dollar for 30 days if you just want to mess around and play with Aircraft on a demo site with demo content.

Think of the sections on these pages as rows. Each row has a job to do, and all those rows stack up to create an entire experience. Quickly, this is what we call a hero area with our primary call to action. There is often a video or a picture. Social proof is important when you are selling on the internet, so this is the trusted-by logos section you see on a lot of websites.

Because this is an LMS website, we have featured courses next. This is the offer stack, which may be different depending on what you are delivering. One of the things we see our users most successful with is combining courses, coaching, and community into a membership. LifterLMS has features for all of that.

We have got a section highlighting the users and community, which is more social proof. We have got testimonials, which are classic social proof. We have got feature boxes. We have got a meet-the-instructors section, which is often important on an LMS site. We have a simple call to action. All these rows sit between the footer and the header with the logo and main menu.

Building A New Homepage Layout In Under A Minute

Chris Badgett: Let me actually create a new page. We are going to rebuild essentially this same homepage in less than a minute. I might not get it done that fast because I am teaching at the same time, but we will see.

Let us call our new page Welcome. On the plus button in the editor, click through to the Patterns tab. Because I have the Aircraft add-on installed, there are a lot of patterns here. There is a hero pattern. There are call-to-action patterns. There is a service offering pattern, which is the offer stack I was talking about. There are testimonial patterns. There are trusted-by rows.

On a homepage, I like to start with a hero, so I insert that. It is already laid out correctly. This can work with the Sky Pilot theme made by LifterLMS, but when we built this we also tested it with Astra, Cadence, Divi, Blocksy, and about 15 other themes. As long as the theme you are using is a modern WordPress theme, Aircraft will adapt, and the design of these elements will pick up the theme you already have.

Editing The Hero Content Inside The Pattern

Chris Badgett: These are the components that make up this hero area. All the settings for spacing and everything are already figured out for you. Instead of trying to build all this stuff from scratch with groups, columns, headings, paragraphs, buttons, and videos, it is all ready to go. All you have to do is start editing.

Put your content in. This is based on over 15 years in marketing and conversion optimization and experience building websites like this. It is very common to have a headline that is kind of a hook, then a short description with positioning, a primary call to action, and either a picture or a video. You can literally replace the placeholder with your video. It could be YouTube, Vimeo, or anything. Or if you do not have a video, you can put a picture there, which I definitely recommend doing.

Speed-Building The Rest Of The Homepage

Chris Badgett: For the speed round, let us add a bunch of stuff really quickly. Go back into Patterns. Add the trusted-by area, which is very common under the hero. If you accidentally add it in the wrong spot, click the block and use Add After to place it outside the previous container.

Then let us put in our service offering, which is the offer stack of what we provide. Then a row of two testimonials. Then a call-to-action pattern, which in this case is a sign-up for the membership to get all the courses. At the end, round it out with a grid of four more testimonials. Publish the page.

You can see we already have the hero, the trusted-by logos, the offer stack, some nice-looking testimonials, the call to action, and more testimonials. We just literally created a homepage really quickly. Of course you can modify the actual content to put in your logos, your words, and your images. You are also welcome to use the images already in the pattern if you find something you want to keep.

Building A Course Sales Page Layout

Chris Badgett: Let us look at how to build a course sales page. Let us go with a course we already have. This is the Saving Strategy course. If you look at this course, this is the default LifterLMS course view, and somebody could purchase it a la carte or get the membership. But let us say we want to create a conversion-optimized sales page for this course.

I add a new page. Then I work with the classic Aircraft layouts for conversion-optimized sales pages. Start with a hero, where I sell the course. Add a row of two testimonials. Add another call-to-action pattern using the simple one. Then put a giant featured testimonial at the bottom.

Now if we view our course sales page, it looks similar to the homepage we just designed, but it is a little more streamlined for a single course sales page. We could also switch to a landing page template to remove the header, page title, and footer for a cleaner sell.

Redirecting A LifterLMS Course To A Custom Sales Page

Chris Badgett: LifterLMS has a really cool feature. If we go back to the Saving Strategy course, scroll down to the sales page content settings. We can show a page on our website, or even a different website altogether, in place of the default course sales screen. We choose Redirect to a WordPress page and pick the Saving Strategy sales page we just created.

What this does is if somebody tries to visit the course and they are not enrolled yet, LifterLMS redirects them to the custom sales page so they can buy the course. If they are enrolled, they land on the enrolled view and can pick up where they left off or get started on the course.

Wiring The Buy Button Into The LifterLMS Checkout

Chris Badgett: To link up your sales page pricing to the buttons on your custom Aircraft-built page, grab the purchase link from the default checkout URL for the access plan. Then go to the sales page you just made, spend some time customizing it, and link the Buy Now button directly to the checkout URL.

Once somebody makes a purchase, they are instantly enrolled in the course. They will not see the sales page again because they are enrolled. If we visit the page as a logged-out user, the Buy Now button drops us straight into the checkout for the Saving Strategy course. That is a quick tour of how to work with Aircraft design components on a course sales page.

Building An About Page With Aircraft Patterns

Chris Badgett: Whether you are building a homepage, a course sales page, or a membership sales page, we have got designs that can work for your About page as well. If I am working on an About page and I want to take the shortcut to a good-looking design, I go into Patterns and choose an About pattern.

There is an already good-looking start to an About page. We can view the page, and it is literally created in a couple seconds. Of course you replace the image and put your text in there.

Using Aircraft Patterns Inside Blog Content

Chris Badgett: Another way you can use Aircraft is in your blog content. If you are writing blogs to generate leads, you can insert lead magnet calls to action inside your blog post content. For an example, if we have an ebook and halfway down a post we want to insert a content upgrade to a lead magnet, we go into Patterns, into calls to action, and insert the lead magnet template. That embeds an ebook call to action to collect an email address from a website visitor reading the blog post.

If you are doing coaching, you might want a call to action where somebody jumps on a 15-minute strategy call, sales call, or discovery call. You can use the schedule-your-free-strategy-call template. Drop that either on a sales page if you do not let people buy right away and want to qualify the lead first, or as an upsell from your blog content or other parts of your website. There are lots of ways to use this outside of homepages and sales pages.

Saving Customized Designs As Reusable Patterns

Chris Badgett: You can reuse these once you customize them. Once you change a pattern and make it your own, you can save it as a pattern so you can drop your version wherever you want in the future. If you are going to publish a content upgrade ebook lead magnet inserted in all your blog posts, save the customized version and reuse it everywhere. That way the design lives in one place and drops in with one click.

Keeping Design In Service Of The Course Content

Chris Badgett: As general advice, when you are building an LMS website, the main event is not the design. We are not selling fashion clothes or beautiful products. What we are selling on an LMS website, even if the training is free, is the education.

Keeping things simple is one of the ways I like to think about design when it comes to a learning management system website. You can make our theme Sky Pilot look amazing with a dark mode, light site, a pink site, or a purple site. But I would encourage you not to get sidetracked into design when the main job of a learning management system website is to educate.

That said, marketing, generating leads, and conversions are really important. Using design templates in the Aircraft page builder can help you speed up and not get stuck. If you have a hundred different pages on your website and you spend six hours on each, you are in real trouble. Aircraft keeps you moving.

Why Reusable Design Templates Matter For Agencies

Kurt Von Ahnen: It is real important to point out that everyone has a different use case and completely different perspective, especially in the WordPress family. Some people have a personal project or are a course creator doing one site. Other people could literally have 35 or 50 sites they are trying to manage. Having tools to quickly implement reusable designs that can still feel personal is a really big asset to have in your back pocket, especially if you have multiple projects.

Will Middleton: I think the essence of WordPress and the block editor is to make things easier to build, easier to maintain, faster on the front end. There is a learning curve to the block editor. If you are coming from Elementor or the classic editor, there is a learning curve. Aircraft helps with the learning curve by providing you a bunch of patterns for your LMS site. It makes what is supposed to be easy even easier.

How Aircraft Adapts To Astra, Cadence, And Other Themes

Chris Badgett: We have a question. What themes can I use Aircraft on? You can use Aircraft on any theme that supports blocks, which is most modern WordPress themes. There is really no limit. We tested Aircraft across 20 of the most popular themes in WordPress and it looks great and adapts really well.

Just to show an example, let me share my screen. Here is the Saving Strategy sales page on the LifterLMS theme Sky Pilot. If we go to Appearance and Themes and switch to Astra, and I paste the sales page link back in the URL bar, Aircraft is still there. It has adapted to the default styles of the Astra theme.

To show one more example, we can switch to Cadence. Go to Appearance and Themes and activate Cadence. Now we visit that same URL. It looks different because the patterns are adapting to the default styles of Cadence out of the box. It is really versatile. It is not just for LifterLMS Sky Pilot users. You can use it with any modern WordPress theme.

Aircraft Versus Elementor: The Native WordPress Argument

Kurt Von Ahnen: What is the difference between Aircraft and Elementor? I tend to simplify this. Aircraft is a library of patterns in the block editor. It is very simple to use. You are already in Gutenberg. You open up, click Add a Pattern, and that pattern fills out multiple blocks in an organized, repetitive way. It is very direct.

Elementor is next level as far as page builders go. There are more options to customize and more things to build row by row, column by column. But it is a completely separate working environment, so there is an extra learning curve. You are adding a whole new tool to your website. Can you have Elementor and still use the block editor within the site? Yes. But once you start using Elementor on a page, that page is edited with Elementor. So you would want to stick with Elementor there.

I use the term OEM a lot. Original equipment manufacturer. I think of WordPress as the main supplier, and then Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, and all those things as aftermarket suppliers adding things to the original product. I really appreciate that Aircraft is part of the original product. It is all in one space. If I go to Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, or Bricks, I am adding a whole new working tool element to the site that has to be subscribed to, maintained, and updated.

Why It Pays To Learn The Native Block Editor

Chris Badgett: The simplicity of Aircraft is one of its features. It gives you a design pattern template library you can choose from. My general advice, having used WordPress a long time, is to spend a weekend, two days, really committed to teaching yourself how the WordPress block editor works. It is one thing to write a blog post and put in headlines, text, and an image. When you start getting into columns, groups, and all the patterns, there is a learning curve.

To really get good at using WordPress out of the box, give yourself permission to take a couple days to really learn what that plus button does. Play around with Aircraft and the design patterns you are adding. Learn about synced and unsynced patterns and what that means.

Ask questions. LifterLMS support is here to help you. If you are getting stuck and want to know if we have a pattern for something, let us know. For me, Kim Coleman on our team is a super power user of Gutenberg. When I get stuck I go to her. Once you get comfortable with native WordPress, it is really empowering. I started with Beaver Builder about seven years ago and I loved it. It is still a great product. But once I got comfortable with native WordPress, it became my tool. Learn the native WordPress tool and use a tool like Aircraft to speed up the website design process.

The Block Editor Has Come A Long Way

Kurt Von Ahnen: It is also worth mentioning, according to the head honcho at WordPress, the Gutenberg project is seven years into a 10-year project.

Will Middleton: It has come leaps and bounds in the last year and a half to two years. If you used the block editor three years ago and you were like, ah this is horrible, it has changed a lot in the last couple of years. It is worth taking another dive into it.

Answering Mrs. C: Where Global Colors Actually Live

Will Middleton: We had a question from Mrs. C, one of my favorite people. She comes to office hours sometimes. She said she is the voice coach and she wants to know if she can change the colors on her website globally through Aircraft. She is using the Launchpad theme.

Kurt Von Ahnen: This is one of those instances where sometimes we confuse a tool for its purpose. Aircraft is the page builder elements. That is what drops those assets into place within the theme. The theme is typically how you manage global colors and things like that, depending on the capabilities of your theme.

You might be able to upgrade to Sky Pilot, which has a lot more design options for global colors and setups. Then you put those elements in place with Aircraft. Come back to office hours because we miss you.

A Look At Sky Pilot Demo Sites Running Aircraft

Chris Badgett: We mentioned earlier the LifterLMS trial site where you can try Aircraft and everything else we make for a dollar on your own domain. Let me pull up a few example sites. This is not Launchpad, this is our Sky Pilot theme. You can see how these websites look really different. This one has a different color scheme. The one we were just on looks more plain and minimalist. Here is another one with a different take on design and color.

The global stuff is mostly controlled at the theme level. That is where you do it. Launchpad has some color options and color pickers, but deep in the settings. If you decide to get onto a modern block-based theme, it will be easier to manage those global settings.

Like we were saying, with Aircraft patterns, if you drop one in and it is black and you want it to be pink, you can change what you dropped in and save it as a pattern. Now that pink content upgrade is your call to action. You can sync it so you drop it in everywhere and make one edit later, and it automatically updates everywhere you dropped it. That is totally doable. It is just a learning curve of learning how to drive that stuff.

What Happens If You Uninstall Aircraft

Chris Badgett: I got a question the other day. What if I use Aircraft and then decide to uninstall it? Will I lose my work? The answer is no. You will not lose it, because you have already inserted the content and built the page. It is there. If you stop using Aircraft or disable the plugin, that content is still there.

That is another way native page building with WordPress and Aircraft wins. There is not a lock-in. If you built your whole site with Elementor, Bricks, or Divi and then disabled those page builders, it changes your site. Aircraft is more like, the content is here. If you switch from Astra to Sky Pilot, or Sky Pilot to Cadence, the content travels with you to the new home and inherits the styles of the new theme. It is more flexible and changeable, with less lock-in, if you use something like Aircraft.

Which LifterLMS Plan Includes Aircraft

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think this might be our last question. What is the best LifterLMS plan to get Aircraft?

Chris Badgett: It is an individual add-on, so you can get it by itself on the LifterLMS website under Features and Add-ons in the menu. Most people get the Universe bundle, which is our lowest plan that has Aircraft. They like the Universe bundle because it also has our Sky Pilot theme, our email marketing integrations, and our ecommerce add-ons. It has everything you need to build the site, design the site, sell the course, and sell the membership.

If you want everything with all the bells and whistles we make, including Aircraft and 21 other add-ons, that is the Infinity bundle. So you can get Aircraft by itself, or one of those two plans. If you are on the fence, I would just get the Universe bundle because it has all the essentials you need to get started and really start building a great, conversion-optimized, beautifully designed site.

Where To Go From Here

Chris Badgett: Thank you Kurt and Will for putting this on with me. Thank you all for coming. If you have any questions about Aircraft page building, just reach out to LifterLMS. Be sure to join our Facebook group. We have got a Slack community. We do live ask-me-anything calls on Thursday.

One more benefit of the Infinity bundle is you get the office hours mastermind, which is a live group call inside Zoom where we can help you. If you are trying to figure out full site editing and the block editor, how to do stuff with LifterLMS, customize your layouts, or you need feedback on a sales page, it is a great opportunity to come get some help. The office hours mastermind is a benefit of the Infinity bundle and the Universe bundle, which is another reason to go ahead and get the Universe bundle if you are on the fence.

Thank you all for coming. I hope you have a great rest of your day.