Why do I use Elementor with WordPress?

I've been working with WordPress for more than 10 years. Previously I had worked with Joomla and, previously, I had developed my own Content Management System (CMS), first with CFML and then with PHP.

Throughout the 25 years that I have been developing websites, I have always looked for those tools to optimize development times and spend more time to analyze and understand the client's needs, offering the best solution to these needs.

My early days with WordPress

The fact of having developed from scratch my own CMS led me to be very critical with those of open source when they began to appear. I landed on Joomla almost by chance and its modularization made me use it in several projects, some of them quite complex. However, I missed quite a few features and, some time later, I came across WordPress.

All the beginnings with a new website development tool are slow and complicated. WordPress caught my attention with its famous "five-minute install". This encouraged me to try it because I came from other tools whose installation and configuration was a nightmare... and that was just the beginning.

The fact is that, indeed, I had a WordPress installed and configured in a few minutes. Now came the phase of understanding its philosophy and, although it was not a bed of roses, it was not so bad either. Moreover, I fell in love with its structural simplicity that makes it so flexible to undertake any type of project, whether it is a corporate website, an e-commerce platform or a booking manager.

On themes and plugins

If that wasn't enough, WordPress had an almost unlimited library of plugins that added all kinds of functions, equally easy to install and configure.

I later learned that, behind those plugins, there is a lot of functionality and that they can be applied directly to the WordPress code.

Themes were something else entirely. All the simplicity of WordPress became a problem when it came to choosing a theme. Each project used to have its own theme, and each theme had its own way of being configured. On top of that, no client wanted their website to look the same as anyone else's, whether they were competitors or not.

This led, on the one hand, to a thorough study of the theme's documentation to configure it properly. And we already know that developers are not always good documenters...

On the other hand, we had to manually make the changes requested by the client, generally using JavaScript and CSS. Thus, development times took forever.

And then came the general themes

Eventually someone thought that it would be a good idea to develop general themes, almost blank sheets of paper, in which to develop the contents. This way, when you learned how to use one of them, you could use that knowledge in future projects.?

You learned, for example, how to use GeneratePress, one of my favorites, and you didn't have to dive into the documentation in the following projects.

In addition, quite a few plugins emerged that expressed themselves in widgets of all kinds and were the forerunners of the builders.

The builder revolution

The first builders were really a collection of basic layout widgets, much like the early Gutenberg blocks were. An example of these was SiteOrigin Page Builder.

Some developers went so far as to include proprietary builders with their themes, for example, Enfold or DIVI. Others used shortcodes, such as WP Bakery.

None of them were visual, what we call WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).?

In 2014 Beaver Builder was launched and in 2016 Elementor appeared, both visual designers. At that time it was already possible to move a design made in Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Adobe XD or Figma (the latter two also appeared in 2016) to a website in a simple way.

The impact on my projects

By 2017 I had a feeling that builders with visual design capabilities were going to have a big impact on my projects. But, of course, you can't work with them all and you had to choose.

So I selected a couple of commercial themes and used the available builders to clone them on a local server and test their capabilities. I would value three parameters in my test:

• The development time.
• The resemblance between the cloned website and the original one
• The quality of the generated code

And the winner turned out to be Elementor... and my way of dealing with projects took a radical turn.

A new approach to projects

As a result of using Elementor, development times were substantially reduced. This allowed more time to be spent on understanding customer needs, researching competitors, and creating much more user and search engine friendly website structures. All without impacting pricing.

The Pareto principle took on a new meaning: from dedicating 80% of the total project time to development and only 20% to the tasks of analyzing and structuring the website, I made a 180o turn, dedicating only 20% of the total project time to development and 80% to interacting with the client and carrying out all the preliminary work that is essential for the success of the project.

This way of working allowed me to take on increasingly complex and value-added projects, which had a very positive impact on my turnover.

Elementor in my day to day

A website is something alive, that evolves according to the needs of the company to which it belongs and that requires changes to adapt to the new needs and objectives of the company.

As webmaster of a large company dedicated to e-commerce solutions, I currently have the responsibility of maintaining corporate websites. We use Elementor as a standard tool because it allows us to make quick changes to our websites. We launch periodic campaigns that rely on landing pages that need to be built with some speed or modifications of content and structures on pages of the website that need to be adapted to our progress.

Elementor, which since its first versions has been undergoing changes aimed at improving workflows, allows us to undertake these jobs with the agility required by a changing and very competitive market.

Obviously, it is not the only solution that I use in my day-to-day work, but it is undoubtedly the one that has the greatest impact on my work.

#wordpress #generatepress #elementor #webdevelopment