“WordPress Unleashed” is how Elegant Themes describes their designs.
In their flagship theme, Divi, they claim to have created “the ultimate visual page builder.”
What does that mean to you?
(Elegant Themes is one of two theme design companies I rely on — the other is StudioPress. Because I like and trust their themes, I’ve joined with them as an affiliate. That means, if you purchase a theme from a link on this site, I earn a commission. It helps me keep the site going, and lets me offer my services at more affordable rates.)
Until recently, they offered nearly 90 different WordPress themes. In fact the company founder, Nick Roach, was a design student in college when he created his first WordPress theme — and until July, 2013, he was the company’s only designer.
Today, they’ve ditched all but two of their themes: Divi, and Extra.
It was a bold move, but when I tell you more about Divi you’ll see that, with these two, they give WordPress users an unlimited potential for building their own beautiful, functional, and unique website.
Elegant and my other go-to designer, StudioPress, were recently declared co-winners in a review of major theme designers. According to the reviewer, “Both companies offer consistently reliable products that take the hassle out of setting up and using a WordPress theme.”
Pricing
Elegant Themes charges you one annual fee of $89/year. This buys you a membership that allows you to use any (or all) of their themes and plugins on as many sites as you own or control.
You also get upgrades and ongoing support for as long as you’re a member.
Currently, they are offering two themes, Divi and Extra, and two plugins.
There’s also a one-time purchase option. Spring for $249 and you get lifetime access to everything.
Appearance
Elegant was one of the winners in the review’s aesthetics category. Their themes are visually appealing, and they stay on top of current design trends. All of their newer themes are mobile responsive.
Security
Rock-solid code and top security practices are a big reason why I use and promote Elegant Themes. They offer:
- Best practices for WordPress coding
- W3C that’s the World Wide Web Consortium — they decide on international standards for websites
- Respected internet security companies like Sucuri audit their themes regularly to look for any possible security issues.
Compatible with the Major Browsers
Some themes display beautifully in Firefox, but look a mess in Internet Explorer (or vice versa). That’s because not all browsers comply with all of the W3C standards. Elegant Themes is compatible with all the major browsers, including:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Opera
- and a few others
What’s a Visual Page Builder?
A page builder lets you create customized pages without knowing programming or code. A visual page builder lets you do it on the front end — the pages your readers see — and add, edit, and manipulate elements and see them, in real time, the way your readers will.
It’s kind of a big deal.
Using the page builder, you can customize any page of your site, from the homepage to a blog post and everything in between.
That includes the:
- layout
- colors
- typography
- background
- and more
This site is built with Divi. When I first launched it, back in 2012, I used the Prose theme from StudioPress. I love StudioPress themes, but when I was ready to give WordPress Building Blocks a new look, I decided to showcase Divi.
Visit the Elegant Themes website.
This article was updated on June 19, 2019.
I have figured out how to do a sort using custom fields. But I can only seem to get it to work for one field. Adding another field just seems to cancel out the first one.
I have a section of suggested books, sorted by subject and by author’s last name. Within the sort by author’s last name, I would like it to list by author’s last name (alphabetically), then by author’s first name (for those authors who share a last name), and then, when it’s necessary by book title when an author has more than one book.
http://www.findingsolace.org/authors-e/