The Beginning
I originally launched this site back at the beginning of July. I was a complete novice on WordPress but had a background in web development, having been a web developer for about 10 years during the early 2000s.
Early on, I decided that I wanted to use a paid theme to build the site because I was looking for a professional-looking site and thought that a paid theme would make that easier to achieve. I quickly gave up on my first theme. It didn’t give me enough control over the look and feel of the site.
So in mid-July, I purchased a lifetime subscription for the Divi Theme from Elegant Themes. At first, I thought it was great. By the end of July, I felt as though I had a good-looking site and was beginning to focus more on adding posts and creating content. Over time I also began to use some of the more advanced features of Divi to get more control over the appearance of certain aspects of the site.
The Pain
In particular, I began using the Theme Builder within Divi to customize the blog portion of the site. Pretty quickly I began to run into issues with formatting. My first interaction with Elegant Theme support went pretty well and I kept pressing forward, however, more issues began appearing. The issues were consistent in that they would happen daily but also random in sporadic in that they would appear in different ways and different places. The one constant was that almost always revolved around the Theme Builder templates that I had built for the blog.
I spent hours upon hours with the online chat support. At one point, I completely deleted all of my templates and started over. At first, that seemed to work but then the next day when I made a new post, the problems were back. In mid-September, I finally decided to give up on Divi. I contacted support and asked for a refund. I was beyond the 30-day money-back guarantee period but thought it was worth a try.
My request was denied but my mind was made up. I was spending most of my time troubleshooting my website instead of building projects and producing content. I moved on.
The New Tools
After a little research, I discovered Elementor. Elementor is not a Theme but rather a Page Builder that includes a Theme Builder. I had to do a little reading to understand the difference between Themes, Theme Builders, and Page Builders and how they relate to one another. Here are some of the places that I read: here, here, here, and here. The distinctions can be a bit blurry since all three affect the look and feel of your website.
Also confusing things for me a bit was the fact that WordPress requires the use of a Theme. Basically, how I came to understand things is that Themes control things at a high level. Through settings pages and panels, you control the overall style of a site. Page Builders are just what it sounds like, tools for actually controlling all of the individual elements on a page. Theme Builders allow you to create reuseable templates and components that are used across your site in various ways. For instance, you can create a header and then define where on your site that header is used.
Digging in to all of this information really helped me learn a great deal more about how WordPress works. I initially purchased a one year license for Elementor as well as a one year license for a theme called Astra Pro. After playing around with the two of them for a few days, I decided that I didn’t need Astra. There was too much duplication of functionality and what I really wanted was the detailed control that Elementor provided.
Remember, though, that WordPress requires the use of a theme. Well, Elementor has a free theme called Hello. It is a very lightweight theme designed specifically to work well with the tools provided by Elementor. So I got a refund for Asta Pro and switched to Hello. Armend with these tools I was ready to rebuild my site.
The Rebuild
Before rebuilding, I used a reset plugin to blow away all of my previous content. This was a tough decision but I really wanted to get a clean start so that I could feel confident that there would be no lingering issues from my first site.
I followed along with the getting started series of YouTube videos and began building my new home page. That took a long time but once I finished that page the work really picked up speed. I then watched other videos from Elementor to learn how to use the Theme Builder functionality of Elementor. This allowed me to customize the layout of the blog portion of the site and create a custom header and footer.
Another really important thing I learned about during this process was the ability to create Custom Post Types in WordPress. Using the CPT UI Plugin and the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Pro Plugin, I was able to create a Project post type that I can use to post information about woodworking projects. The CPT UI Plugin allowed me to create the post type. The ACF Pro Plugin gave me the ability to define the fields that I wanted for the Project post type. Now I can publish information about projects as easily as writing a blog post.
While I wasn’t happy about having to start my site over from scratch, in the end, I think it has worked out well. I lost that money that I paid for Divi but starting over forced me to learn more about how WordPress works. I am really happy with Elementor and very excited with how the site came out.
The Future
Before beginning work on this new version of my site I had been working on building a bunch of wooden crosses based on the one that I had built for my son, Brennan, in August before he moved off to start college. I plan to get back to finishing those soon. As for the site, I have a number of projects to post and I plan to post to this blog often. There are also two pages that I didn’t finish. They are the “What I Use” and “Shop Tour” pages so these are also on my agenda to work on soon.