Short on time?
Non-coder graphic designers who build websites are often lured into multi-purpose themes like Divi, Avada or X.
These themes certainly seem like attractive solutions for designers—at first. They promise visual drag-n-drop builders, full design control and ease of use.
But as most eventually discover, these themes are not the answer. They’re bloated, slow, hard to customise, and provide surprisingly little room for creativity or custom design—at least for my students anyway.
Read on to learn more… and discover a far superior alternative.
Everyone’s complaining!
Here at Design Build Web, I teach non-coder graphic designers how to build custom-designed, responsive websites quickly and easily, to their own custom designs.
My email inbox—and the Facebook groups I’m in—are overflowing with complaints. They’re complaining bitterly about their experience using multi-purpose WordPress themes, like Divi, Avada or X.
And I totally understand.
Because I’ve used all 3 of those themes myself too.
Why do graphic designers choose multi-purposes themes like these?
If you’re a graphic designer and you want to build WordPress websites to your own design vision, then ‘pre-designed’ WordPress themes are a big no-no. Way too restrictive.
You’re a designer, for heaven’s sake!
So the lure of multi-purpose themes like Divi, Avada or X is very strong.
These themes certainly seem like attractive solutions for designers—at first. They promise visual builders, unfettered design control and supreme ease of use.
So we’re all on the same page: No ‘bashing’ intended here. In case you’ve missed me mentioning it already, I’m recommending an approach I feel is best suited to my specific audience and their needs, based on lots of personal experience—mine and theirs. That’s all.
What’s so attractive about these themes for designers?
The feature lists on the sales pages of these themes look great. The beautiful demos on their sales websites look amazing!
So what’s the problem?
Or: The broken dreams of multi-purpose themes…
Many of my students are Divi survivors who lived to tell the tale.
Just now, I took a very quick sweep of recent emails in my inbox, as well as a quick review of some Facebook groups I’m in.
Here are some of the complaints about these themes I found, in less than a minute of looking:
“I thought Divi seemed the best way forward, but just felt the whole WordPress experience felt like designing in a strait jacket, and to push the boundaries meant becoming a guru in CSS. I’ve not touched WordPress for over a year. Divi just frustrated the hell out of me.” – David, via email.
Don’t worry… It’s not all doom and gloom. Keep reading for a happy ending to this…
