That’s the sound of goals being smashed!
Two years ago, I went to one of those networking/brainstorming events where business owners get serious about planning. We all had to carefully consider the tasks that, if we achieved them, would make the year feel successful. These had to be tangibly good for our businesses, not amorphous things like “make more money” or “get more clients.” To that end, I decided that one great thing for my business would be to choose a full-featured, scalable, super-customizable WordPress theme development house that I could recommend for the majority of my clients.
That last sentence sounds like a lot of industry gobbledygook, right?
Let me break it down. WordPress is the software I use on almost all of my clients’ new web sites — the way iOS is for your Mac or Windows is for your PC, WordPress is for your web site. In a programmatic layer on top of WordPress are something we call “themes.” You can imagine them like skins or even programs — you use Microsoft Word to do word processing on your Mac, and you use a theme to add fancy styling and functionality to your WordPress site.
Unlike the world of word processing, though, where there are just a few software options (Word, Google Docs, Pages), there are thousands and thousands of “themes” available for WordPress. Some of them are free, and some of them have a cost associated with them. Some of them just let you change colors and images, and some of them offer a bajillion options (roughly) for ways you can lay out your content and add functionality. Though a few of my clients come to me having researched WordPress themes and chosen one already, most of them asked me to make recommendations for them.
As a result, a few years ago I found myself having to learn my way around a new theme on every single web site I built. It was doable, but not super efficient. The problem was that I hadn’t yet found one theme that could be customized well enough to fit all of my clients. That’s when I decided the search for the perfect theme was going to be one of my goals for that year.
Do-gooders of the world, I have great news: I found it, and now that I’ve been working with it for two years, I can tell you unequivocally that Elegant Themes’ Divi is THE BOMB. Here are just a few of the sites I’ve built with it. You tell me if this theme is versatile:
School for Little Children
Our first Divi site. Talk about embracing a card-style layout!
Piven Theatre
Click through on this one for edgy angles, minimal styling, and professional photos that steal all the limelight.
RG Adoption Consulting
“Can you make my website boho-chic?” One swirly, floral, inviting web site FULL OF ADORABLE BABIES coming right up!
The Big Schmear Podcast
Oy, a whole website of Jewish food? We noshed our way through this delicious design built around podcast episodes, a recipe blog, and a lot more than bagels.
Levy Coaching
Aesthetic goal? “Hopeful,” said Jonathan Levy, owner of Levy Coaching. We used full screen photography to achieve a look-and-feel that kept us on the sunny side.
Grief Therapy Center
Mimicing the color scheme of Meg Eifrig’s soothing office space, we built a simple, calming site ready to receive her clients.
It’s official: Divi is our theme. Its backend is like Legos™ for the web — draggable, customizable, and full of all kinds of fun features like price comparison charts (you’ll find one here) and animation (like the images on this blog post) and counters (like the coffee meter on our home page) and contact forms and maps and audio players and countdown timers and video integration and testimonials and dozens more. I’ve integrated it with MailChimp (for mailing lists), Contact Form 7 (for file attachments sent directly to your email), with Yoast (to optimize your site for search engines), and with several other tools.
Did I mention their 24/7 customer service? And the huge online forum for Divi users? And the weekly emails with design tips and prebuilt templates?
Jebraweb has a developer license for Divi, which means our clients get access to this incredible tool for a fraction of the price they’d pay if they bought it themselves. While we can and do build sites with other themes, if you ask us to choose, it’s Divi all the way.
Want to know more? We’d love to show you some demos of what we and Divi can do for you. In the meantime, we’ll keep experimenting!
Not even sure how to start?
Let's just talk. Tell us what's bumming you out about your web site, and we'll cheer you up with all the cool things we could do together to make it better. We offer free fifteen-minute phone consultations to get you inspired and both of us acquainted.