When building raymondbruce.com I decided to use WordPress. This is after years of being a Joomla user. Joomla, however, I left behind after a lot of resistance by myself too switching to WordPress. One of the main reasons for the switch from, was Joomla’s inability to create multi-site websites natively.
Multi-site basically means the ability to create multiple sites under different domains from one installation. Also, I didn’t want to go through the process of learning how to use another CMS, which can take months.
The switch to WordPress
After building numerous test sites with WordPress, I decided to take the codeless route and use the Avada theme, the number one theme on Theme Forest, to build raymondbruce.com. It wasn’t long before I realised that there were things that I wanted to do with my site that weren’t possible with the Avada theme.
While this has now changed after many updates, At the time, I was not able to have different coloured headers or menu bars for different sections of my site. One for the homepage, one for my blog, and another for my eventual online store—this was a no-go for me. Which led me to do some research and discover Elementor.
Elementor
Elementor is a website builder that gives you the ability to build websites without having to do any coding. With all the features you need and features you don’t know you need. I would recommend anybody building a site to give it a try. I know of other builders like Divi, Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, WPBakery Page Builder, and others, but for me, Elementor is the one.
Don’t get me wrong; all the other builders are more than capable of building sites. But for me in terms of usability, I find Elementor easy to use. Since I brought Elementor, Avada has had many updates and seems to be switching from an editable theme to a site builder in the vein of Elementor.
Not to waste the $60+ I paid for Avada I have both Avada and Elementor installed on raymondbruce.com. With Avada’s has the default theme, I get to use all the premium plugins that came with Avada. While I can still use Elementor to build the site and also have the features of Avada available to me.
The Elementor pricing model is based on a yearly licence starting at $0 for a basic version of Elementor. $49 for the Essential package for use on one site. $99 for the Advanced package for use on 3 sites and $199 for the Pro package for 25 sites.
(The pro package used to be for 1000 sites) The developers of Elementor say they chose this pricing model in order to have sustainable funding for the development of Elementor.
This is unlike Avada, which is a one-time payment. So over time, I can see myself using Avada alone to do the updates on my site once Avada’s features match those of Elementor. Negating my need to pay a yearly licence fee for Elementor and only paying when in need of a security update. All functionality built with Elementor will still work fine after my licence expires.
However, letting my licence expire is a long way off. The only downside I had with Elementor was the requirement to buy the Advanced subscription at $99/year in order to install Elementor on a staging site. However, now that requirement has been changed. I can now install Elementor on my computer via a xampp installed on my computer, a staging site, and a live site with an Essential licence.
So I look forward to developing my site with both Avada and Elementor.
