Basic Beginnings
My first introduction to building websites was completely by hand, from scratch, with no templates. Every line of code was typed by me, which meant I had complete control over where everything landed on the page. This gave me full access to troubleshoot problems and manipulate elements any which way I wanted them.
Launching my first hand-coded website was very exciting. Putting something you make out into the world is a very rewarding experience, and claiming your own little corner of the world wide web has a very official feeling. Through the magic of technology, thousands of lines of gibberish code I wrote were dumped into a hosting bucket, and Voilà! They became colors and pictures on a computer screen for anyone in the world to see.
Super fun! But not super practical. I had no easy way to edit, track changes, or save versions. I knew I was missing something because there was no way this very impractical method for making websites was responsible for the vast ocean of colors, animations, and functionality that is the internet.
Enter WordPress
I didn’t know it at the time, but that missing piece I was looking for was a content management system. I’m a simple, practical kind of girl and WordPress is a simple, practical kind of CMS. WordPress comes with an abundance of themes that make edits easy and organize access to content in a simple, practical way. It’s magical.
Building websites in WordPress is dreamy. All of the fun, none of the drudgery…until you get better at it. As you fine-tune any skill, there is a natural progression towards wanting more control over your tools because you know how to use them more effectively. Using themes is great, but there is always something that doesn’t fit quite right or a special case for certain elements that can leave a developer longing for the precision of a hand-built website.
Enter Elementor
Then along came Elementor. Elementor is a super-smooth WordPress page builder that combines expert-level flexibility and control with an easy-to-use visual interface that swept me off my feet! For website editing beginners, it’s got a gorgeous visual editor on the backend that’s easy on the eyes. You can see your changes in real-time – no more saving, refreshing, and switching tabs just to see what happened! For professionals, it has all the details, details, details packed into every widget like a giant swiss army knife – there when you need it, ignored when you don’t.
Elementor is beginner friendly.
CurlyHost takes client empowerment seriously. Every website we build starts with the client in mind as the future editor and we don’t want to hand you a headache. We put a lot of thought into how teachable our designs are for future management.
Elementor allows us to build pixel-perfect creations that are easily maintained even by people who avoid technology. We build the pretty templates; you copy, paste, and edit – just like writing an email. Maintaining your website is really as simple as that.
Elementor is easy and fast to work with.
Want to copy something from another page? Save anything as a template or global widget and you can insert it anywhere on your site – lots of themes have that option. But! With Elementor you can also right-click any element and copy and paste it into another editor on a different browser window – you don’t even have to save it as a template. What!?
Are you an indecisive type? You can easily set up as many global colors, fonts, and widgets as you like so you can easily play with color schemes and layouts without having to remember hex codes or font sizes. Air high five to that! ✋
Elementor is packed with features.
Need to add a custom font? No problem. Want social share buttons, or a contact form? No problem. Elementor covers all the basic add ons most websites need to get going. Many of these features are not regularly included in themes and would require additional plugins for each feature. Plugins are great and we love them, but fewer plugins mean a more secure and compatible website overall and we love that too.
Elementor is optimized for responsiveness.
Now, every theme will tell you that and most of them will be – if your standards are low enough. But remember what I said about details, details, details? Elementor sites look decent by default on mobile like most other themes, but Elementor also has a tablet and mobile-specific editors to tweak your layouts in any view down to the last little pixel.
All those highly customizable widgets can handle settings for desktop, tablet, and mobile, so developers have all the same detailed controls for every view.
Elementor is built for professional developers.
With all this gushing about easy peasy and user-friendliness, you might start thinking Elementor is a technical light-weight, but far from it! Elementor is built to be extendable, meaning they know they can’t give you everything so they make it easy for developers to add functionality and customizations on their own.
Elementor is open source software.
Why should you care about that? Open source code is written by developers and for developers. This means that the code base is open to anyone to read, download, manipulate, and suggest edits through a peer-reviewed process. This opens the software up to a crowdsourced team of developers who can quickly detect issues. Open-source software is generally considered higher quality, more secure, and more customizable.
Elementor is widely used and very compatible with other plugins.
Elementor has over 5 million active installations worldwide. It is the gold standard in WordPress visual page builders and developers love to work with it because it is open-source software. This means they can develop their own customizations and offer them for others to use in the WordPress plugin market.
Do you need to add specific functionality to an Elementor widget that doesn’t have it? Chances are someone else did too and there is already a plugin for it. It’s kind of like shopping for cars. If you want something user-friendly, widely supported, and easy to maintain for you and your mechanic, don’t choose a rare Ferrari for your daily commute.
Conclusion
Obviously, we love working with Elementor and we think you will too. WordPress themes come and go, sometimes as fast as the changing seasons. Nobody wants to put time and resources into developing the perfect website only to find themselves unsupported 18 months later when their theme developers abandon the product to work on a new side gig. Elementor is here to stay and a valuable tool for your investment.
