Designing a website has always been a nightmare for me. I struggled from day one to make my website look anything like I had imagined in my head. When I first created my blog, I knew nothing about graphic design, coding, or building a website. So, I did some Google research and hit the ground running. I signed up with VentraIP. I downloaded WordPress, and then I bought a theme that looked appealing and had a high rating.
This seemed like a great starting point. I was really excited and I immediately started customizing my website. I started making my site look the way I wanted, and I added some content, but there were some quirks and odd spots that began to bother me.
In the beginning, I was so busy creating content and building my online presence that I didn’t have time to figure out why my menu bar doubled up in the mobile version or why some of my colors wouldn’t change.
Eventually, these quirks started to really bother me, so I looked into it, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t figure out how to fix these odd spots. I ended up learning some coding so that I could fix some of the problem areas, and this worked for a little while. Then a theme update came around the corner, all the quirks returned, I could no longer edit the code, and I decided I was done.
I was sick of spending hours trying to fix these little quirks and issues. I knew how I wanted my website to look, but I was struggling to make it happen, and ultimately, my website theme was holding me back, which is when I knew I needed to ditch my WordPress theme. After reviewing and looking into quite a few page builders, I ended up choosing Elementor.
I Ditched My WordPress Theme for Elementor
Elementor is a webpage design tool specifically for WordPress websites. It has a ton of great features for functionality, and it has some fun and creative elements to help your website stand out (flip boxes, countdown timers, carousels, and more!).
There is a free version of Elementor which has all the basics. There is also paid or pro version that has some additional features and customisations (I started with the free version and then upgraded). The paid Expert plan is $199 annually. You will only need the Personal plan as this is suitable to just the one website, its priced affordably at $49 annually. It was definitely worth the small investment to get my time and sanity back with building my clients websites.
Features
Elementor offers quite a few prebuilt blocks and pages that you can customize and insert into your webpage. If you can’t find what you want within Elementor’s templates, you can build a page from scratch or access more templates from the Envato Elements plugin or tyler.com.
You can also create your own templates and sections like headers, footers, and menu blocks that you can add to each page to keep your website cohesive. Every aspect of every page is customisable within Elementor. There are no restrictions and no pesky theme rules to hold you back. Hallelujah!
Some of my favorite features include the ability to add and customise menus along with the ability to easily view and edit the mobile version of your site. Menus is a fantastic feature because menus are traditionally a part of your theme, which can make menus nearly impossible to edit. Elementor also has the option to view and edit the mobile and tablet versions of your site. You can make customisations to just the mobile version without impacting the desktop version of your website, which is extremely convenient. These are two areas where I previously struggled and spent a lot of time, but now I have the ability to easily make my menus and mobile version look precisely how I want.
Overall, I am extremely impressed with Elementor and so happy that I made the decision to ditch my WordPress theme.
If you’re interested in using Elementor, make sure to check out the second part of this blog series. In this post I will go over setting everything up for success.