Elegant Themes has created this excellent WordPress Theme called Divi and I must admit that when I was first taking a look at this theme I thought to myself “This is probably going to be like most other WordPress themes out there” but I was wrong. With most WordPress Theme developers on the net today they usually charge you by the theme so when a new theme comes out you have to buy another theme. The first thing I noticed with Elegant themes is that they charge a yearly fee for access to all their themes starting at $69 a year which is down right affordable. I’ve long been a lover of StudioPress but after reviewing Elegant themes I am seriously questioning a switch to a different theme provider.
Now if that wasn’t reason enough to look at Elegant Themes, Divi provides an excellent value proposition because most people complain about having to code websites. Its a hazard of this technology because it allows for such great customization. Lately there has been a shift in the web design community to focus on giving greater control of the user interface (the visual design of your web pages) and removing complexity. Now does Divi deliver on that? Let’s take a look…
A Deeper Dive…
While the video they provide is great, I personally wanted to take a deeper dive and look at the functionality up close while reviewing this product. In doing so I focused in looking at the following
Caching/Performance – does it seem slow or clunky? – The first thing that I was surprised about was how quick it is to make changes on the fly. It didn’t buffer at all as it loaded or as I used it.
Navigation – How easy is it to understand and use? – Its pretty intuitive to use Divi. When you hover over a specific area on the theme one of the first things I noticed was that a menu pops up and the area you are editing is highlighted. The menu is fairly robust allowing you to do everything from editing the layout of an element on your website to customizing rows and other CSS options.
Ease of Customization – How easily could you use this? – Its very easy to customize the text, fonts and what I like about it is that it doesn’t just appeal to the novice or newbie web designers out there. If you’ve written custom CSS classes you can reference them as well as you customize. You can also “templatize” items you are developing for later use in Divi making it quicker and easier to customize even the more advanced sites.
Divi 3.0 has a base price of $89 per year and not only includes access to Divi 3.0 but all of Elegant Themes catalog for a year which is an awesome value. Its hard to go wrong with looking at Divi as a serious WordPress Theme that you could use to setup a website, run your online business and be able to do it yourself. For professional web designers Elegant Themes is a solid choice to inject your own style with a solid theme framework that is very versatile. Couple that with the fact that you’ve got a very neat interface to build it in real time without a lot of coder (for you newbies out there) and the fact that you can “templatize” certain elements on your web pages for later use makes Divi a great choice for your next WordPress theme.
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