Using a page builder like Elementor


I’ve been a big convert to Elementor in the last year. It is a fantastic page builder and essentially it makes themes completely useless. For websites, rather than blogs, I always found themes to be confusing to the novice user. The idea that you would choose your theme before you had content is misleading. I watched many Journalism students choose a theme and then get confused by why their site did not look like the examples. The answer: they had no content.

A page builder is a great way to evolve the design of your site, which is what you do with any website. Until you have content, it is so hard to say what it should look like. A modern page builder like Elementor enables you to design your top-level landing pages with greater control, and to use dynamic widgets to load posts or other content based upon some taxonomy. I also love using Anywhere Elementor, as it provides even more control over the templating of the items that appear in the dynamic lists of content. I’ll give you a good example of this later.

For now, I just want to finish off by encouraging everyone to explore page builders. I used Divi for a long time and eventually I switched to Elementor because it is easier to use. It also has some good development hooks to build your own widgets. I’ll be sharing my experiments with that soon.

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