Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi and welcome to episode 44 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is your host, Lee Jackson, and we’ve got Ben Pines coming up. Coming up for you shortly. He’s from Elementor. Yep, that’s another visual builder other than Beaver Builder. Don’t worry, I’m still in love with Beaver Builder. So, you know, there’s no panic there, but we gotta bring other options to the table. Elementor is really new, but really cool and really quite exciting. So this is a great interview. It’s great fun to learn from Ben as well and his story, their challenges along the way. And guys, I’d also like to recommend you cheque out something really exciting. We are gonna be doing 31 episodes. Yep, 31 episodes throughout October on a particular theme. That is WordPress plugins to try before you die. Yes, freaky scary. We love Halloween, absolutely love, love, love Halloween, so we figured it would be a great opportunity to celebrate that by putting out a short episode every single day with one WordPress tip a day.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Some you probably already know, but I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be the odd tip in there that you’re like, whoa, I could use this. So it’s going to be WordPress tips to try before you die. You can go to leejaxondev.com/october to get on the list to be notified when it goes live, or, you know, just go on the 1st of October to the podcast and it will be there. They’re going to be called tipisodes as well, which is a pretty cool name, huh? Well, well, I think it’s cool. So hey, all right, before I go, just a quick reminder as well. If you head on over to leejaxondev.com/group, you can go and enjoy the cat pictures and also the conversations that go on in there. And at some point Ben says something that kind of shocked me. So let’s have a chat about that. You’ll know what I mean later on. Let’s have a chat about that. I think we need to talk about this. All right, guys, see you on the other side. Welcome to yet another episode of the WP Innovator Podcast. And today we have Ben Pines from Elementor in the house.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Ben, how are you doing, mate?
Ben Pines
Hi guys, I’m great. Awesome. How are you, Lee?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m brilliant. I’m very excited to talk to you. People probably know who listen to the podcast that I’m really excited about visual builders. There seems to have been a renaissance, doesn’t there, recently in the last 1 or 2 years of visual builders and, uh, and front-end editing. Cause I don’t know, maybe about 4 or 5 years ago there was like that basic front-end editing where people could click on a field and then edit it and then press enter and it would save, which was kind of cool. But now things have gotten so exciting. So guys, Ben is from Elementor and also Podia. Pojo themes. That’s pojo.me and elementor.com. And they are responsible for the brand new and exciting and free— what? Free, free Elementor visual builder, which looks absolutely freaking cracking. And I’ve already had a go at it and I love it. It’s very, very clever, very quick, and, you know, very intuitive. So that’s my kind of introduction. But Ben, do you just want to say hi, introduce yourself, and let people know how you got involved in all of this?
Ben Pines
Okay, so first, thank you for the kind words.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No worries.
Ben Pines
And how I got to— I’m the CMO for Elementor, and I actually got into this company as a user. I was one of the theme users, like, when they first started. It was a year and a half ago, and I love the themes that we produced. And I think it was about a year ago I was in, I had an interview with a company. I was in, in the direction to going to an interview because I, I think I had my own business and then I closed my business and decided to return to be an employee. So I was going to the interview and then I sort of stumbled upon an interview with, you know, a different interview with the founders and that’s how I joined the team and Since then, it’s history.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay, that’s pretty cool. That’s a good way in. I like it. So you’ve gone from user to being an integral part of the company. And your marketing is obviously good, mate, because I’ve already heard you on other podcasts. You were on with Kim Doyle, I believe. Was that— has that gone live yet?
Ben Pines
I don’t think so.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, sorry. Well, coming up soon, guys. He’s coming up with Kim Doyle as well. As people know, I’m really good friends with Kim as well, so I kind of get to know what’s going on behind the scenes. But also, we’re seeing you all over the internet and your Facebook. I don’t know if you’re doing any Facebook marketing, but you guys keep popping up in my Facebook feed as well, which I’ve noticed. So if that’s—
Ben Pines
We’re targeting you specifically. Sorry? We’re targeting you specifically on your podcast.
Lee Matthew Jackson
There you go. So it obviously works very well.
Ben Pines
Mission accomplished, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. Now then, all right, well, let me explain what Elementor is quickly in my understanding, and then you can take it from there. But Elementor is a visual builder that works with, I believe, the content area, and you can do one of two things. You can either you know, create an entire page, or alternatively you can manage the content area in, in whichever theme you might have. So if you’ve got a theme that outputs the content in a box and you’ve got your header and your footer from the theme, then you can manage what goes on inside of that content area. Is that a correct understanding of how Elementor works?
Ben Pines
That’s true. It can be for pages, for posts, for any post types.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Perfect. And the idea there as well then is it means you can build not only an entire website that looks completely different, but also it allows you as well to build your landing pages and all of all of the other stuff as well. So that obviously saves you on costs if you don’t want to be investing in something like LeadPages and you want to create your own custom post type and their, you know, for landing pages and then use Elementor for that as well. You, you can do that, which is really cool. And one of the things I love— so the first kind of big question I have, mate, is how come you decided to go into the market with such a packed product and charge nothing?
Ben Pines
You mean the open source and free, why we decided to go this way?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, exactly. I mean, Let’s just compare this now to Beaver Builder. Beaver Builder have come in with their basic version, which only has, I think, about 5 or 6 different things you can drag in for free. You guys have come in with a humongous array of add-ons, all for free. And where can you go from there?
Ben Pines
This was a decision that was kind of counterintuitive because the actual model that we had before that for the themes that we sold were exclusively premium. No free trial, nothing. And what made us go this way were two reasons. The first was that we really thought it was, there was a need for something different because WordPress being, you know, 27% of all websites are today built on WordPress. So it’s a hugely popular CMS with a much less superior, much more inferior builder. Than the competition, you know, Wix or Squarespace. So we really wanted to bring an open source free solution that was, that would be, that will become, you know, like a standard. I don’t know how many people still use only the, you know, the visual editor of WordPress, but I think in the next year this will be reduced to, you know, really a few, few people. So this was the first reason. The second reason was, you know, it’s a It’s a marketing strategy. I mean, it’s a great way to reach people and get the support of the community.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So is that— so I mean, you talk about creating something that will work for, you know, as an alternative. Are you thinking that you would want to see something like this become a part of core WordPress, or are you still seeing this as something that will always be an add-on which you’ll also be able to monetize at some point?
Ben Pines
I don’t think so, because if you see other plugins, WooCommerce or WPML, it’s not something that is fit to be added to the core. Because for several reasons, the structure of WordPress, and I think it will, I think, you know, it’s a prediction, but I don’t think it will become part of WordPress, but I think it’s a must-have, like, you know, like Yoast SEO plugin.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, you’re right. I think every build at the moment we do comes with Yoast or an SEO plugin of somebody’s choice because sometimes some clients have slightly different tastes in what they need, but Yoast seems to be the most popular. And again, with a visual builder, I can’t imagine a future like you’ve just said where people will continue to build sites with just the very simple WYSIWYG editor that WordPress pumps out there because it is so restricted in my view and also very, very difficult to try and train clients to build beautiful website. So I could design something that’s beautiful and then give them the site, and then they start trying to do something in the editor of WordPress, and it just does not work out, does it? Because they’re trying to float an image to the right using just the default TinyMCE settings, and nothing ever looks quite as beautiful as you’ve designed it. So I think this is the need you’re serving.
Ben Pines
Yeah, it’s great for the— as you said, for the clients themselves, because it’s so easy But what we’ve tried really hard to create with Elementor was a tool that was really great for designers as well. So we really put an emphasis on making it the most customizable and with the broadest options to design pixel-perfect pages. So you’re not restricted to any kind of bootstrap design that looks Horrible.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So you say Bootstrap, do you use your own framework with regards to it being responsive or are you baking Bootstrap into the?
Ben Pines
Yeah, no, it’s not Bootstrap.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cool. So it’s your own in there as well.
Ben Pines
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay. That’s also a positive because I was thinking potentially adding in extra, it can add extra bloat I think when people are building in a framework as well, especially if you’re using it in conjunction with another theme that may already have Bootstrap in it. So that was one thing I’d noticed with other builders. They’ve loaded in the extra frameworks, et cetera. So that can add a little bit of extra bloat. So when did Elementor— when was this birthed? Is this something that you’ve been building over many years or is this something that just kind of happened overnight in reaction to the other builders that are coming on the scene?
Ben Pines
It took a year to develop and we launched on the beginning of June, this June.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Ben Pines
So it’s only like 3 and a half months, something like that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
3 and a half months. And do you know how many downloads you’ve had so far?
Ben Pines
I think it’s, last time I checked it was over 70,000.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s incredible. 70,000 downloads in 3 months. That’s almost, that’s testament I think as well though, isn’t it, to the WordPress community and your strategy there has been to provide something for free, but you’ve now got an audience of potentially up to 70,000 people that know of your product, that have used your product and experienced the quality you’re outputting. So I think that’s a really clever tactic to get into the market, providing something that’s open source, that’s free, but adds really high value. And you guys, I can say, have not scrimped on the quality here. The output of the designs that you can do is very much at the level that you could achieve with something alternative like Divi 3 or with Beaver Builder as well. So it was a huge surprise when I when I checked this out and took a look through it, which is why I really wanted to ask why on earth you’d gone with something that seems so premium for free, but I get it now. 70,000 downloads. I’m just giving you a virtual high five. Yeah, yeah. Have you got that?
Ben Pines
Got it back, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Virtual high five. That’s freaking awesome. So what sort of plans do you guys have for the future? So I’m— you may already understand that I am totally in love with Beaver Builder, and I probably will be for a long time because of the way I’m able to work with it for particular clients in my niche. But that’s not to say that I’m never going to use Elementor or Divi or anything else for other projects, etc. So to help the people who are thinking of what visual builder they want to go and experience or maybe commit to, what sort of plans do you guys have for the future? So let’s just do a quick comparison with something like Beaver Builder. You can create multiple templates and resave them, reuse them, you can export them, and you can also do things like split up and create alternative headers and footers, etc., and insert them into all sorts of other areas. Are you guys looking at evolving into a very complex system, or are you just going to focus on people being able to just do one page at a time?
Ben Pines
Well, first of all, I want to say a word about what we already did, because in the 3 months we already had 2 major releases.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So one was the template library, which I’ve not got yet, so I better hit update.
Ben Pines
Yeah, yeah, it’s a template library that’s also completely free. The already 20 templates you can use. We plan to expand that template library. We also recently released mobile editing, which is a toolset that allows you to change the entire look for mobile. So you can visually set different sizes for fonts and reverse the column order. So a lot of issues that designers face in the transition to move from, you know, from desktop to mobile. This, we’ve solved this visually very easily with no, you know, don’t have to duplicate anything. It’s all done from within the panel. So this is what we’ve done so far. We have plans. First of all, we’re working hard now on the Pro plan to include a lot of more advanced capabilities that they’re more directed that people that use Elementor as a tool for work, you know, for clients.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Ben Pines
So yeah, and we also have plans for something with regards to theme and all-inclusive, you know, solution, you know, for the design of the website.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Awesome. What I was going to ask actually next was about themes. Now you guys do offer themes over on pojo.me. Are you guys implementing this in those themes now moving forward?
Ben Pines
Yes. Yes. We’re working hard on that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. That’s fantastic. And I assume as well then, as this is open source, this is something that you would probably hope that people who are building, say, ThemeForest themes, et cetera, would start to include Elementor in their themes as opposed to something like the terrible visual composer that makes me cry.
Ben Pines
This actually started— we’ve seen some theme developers starting to implement it and reaching a nice result. So yeah, this is a direction that we plan to go even further with. We will also release an API. It will also be a great step for developers adding new modules and add-ons.
Lee Matthew Jackson
The API is something I personally would find very important as well because I’d want to be able to control the output as a developer and designer. I know I need to control exactly what things look like. And also sometimes I find that, I mean, I’m not sure what the W3C output of your builder is, but with things like Beaver Builder or with Divi, I have found that certain elements are not W3C or AA valid. So they’ll register errors, whereas because, say, Beaver Builder does have that ability to create your own modules, etc., that allows me therefore to kind of override the Beaver Builder modules and make sure that my output is W3C valid. So it sounds like to me you’re going to build something to allow people to build their own modules as well.
Ben Pines
Yeah. Yes. This is something that will be in the future. We’re talking about that, like deciding on roles and what you can edit and what the client can edit. So this will also be a future release. The standards, we’ve really placed a great emphasis since the start of the project on writing, you know, with the best code standards. So I think Elementor is by far on the top of how fast it works. You don’t have any lags, you don’t have any, you know, loading time.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So no, that’s, that’s good. I guess though, that there will always be the odd little W3C issue. So a lot of agencies like myself to comply to a zero error in W3C validator. And most of the visual builders— and I do believe I ran a test the other day with Elementor and found a couple of red errors on there, so I would have had to have cleared them off if I was going to hand over a site to a client. So making sure that they’re, you know, for us it’s very important as an agency what we’re, what we’re putting out there, and making sure that whatever tools we use are W3C compliant. AA is a bit more of a grey area because you’ve got things like colour schemes that a client might use, which you can’t control, and that’s something that they have to take advice on. But for things like W3C, they are some standard, you know, the sorts of standards that we as an agency—
Ben Pines
most websites today aren’t, don’t have the W3C. I think it, the, the importance that it has today is it has a less emphasis from the Google side as well. I don’t think It’s such a— but I don’t know, maybe in the UK.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’d agree. No, I’d agree. That’s what I’ve heard. But unfortunately, the current— well, maybe not unfortunately, because at least it’s making people stick to some sort of standards, which is good. But also a lot of the clients, a lot of the agencies and a lot of the clients expect this and have not been educated in any other way to—
Ben Pines
Yeah, I actually started out as an SEO guy. 10 years ago, and there was a period, I think, that W3C was really hyped and we would go over the client side and, you know, fix everything. It was really hard work. Yeah. But in the last couple of years, I haven’t heard a lot of mentions of that importance coming from, coming from Google. And I think it’s much more important to create a fast, fast website that is fast, has a fast load, load time, and also that is mobile friendly, that is truly responsive. And I mean, smartly responsive. That’s, that’s more of an emphasis that we’ve, we’ve placed.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay. It would be interesting to do a poll then, because I’d like to find out from the listeners how much emphasis they put on W3C. So I know that 95% of my clients expect W3C compliance. So it’s something that we have to build in. We have multiple stages throughout the build where we’ll do a W3C test, including right at the very end. So, you know, so we’ll implement it.
Ben Pines
You know, if it doesn’t have any meaning, then it’s just hard work that you’re doing sort of for nothing. And I think there’s a problem in, especially in the SEO industry, whereas this is also the objection of the marketing community to using builders at all, that you want to have the most perfect website with 100 score on, and that is not always the best way to, to, to build your business. And you should always strive to be fast and responsive and built with clean code with no conflicts. But that doesn’t always mean get the credential of W3C or these sort of over-optimization things.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So what are your thoughts? If you head on over to leejaxondev.com/group, let’s have a conversation about this on the Facebook group. W3C, does it matter to your clients anymore or not. So like I said, in my experience, 95% of clients require it, so we charge for that. We actually charge for it, so we don’t do it for free. It’s part of our cost, and we put time aside to do the W3C. And it’s no biggie for us because we’re so used to coding in that way anyway. We know what it’s going to put an error on, so we’ll tend to just make sure we don’t do that sort of code. But with the rise of visual builders, it has made it a little bit harder for us to do if we’re using inbuilt elements of a builder, which has meant for us we’ve had to make sure we create our own modules. But yeah, I’m definitely interested to know what is happening out there with your agencies or with your clients, guys. How big is W3C for you? If anyone is an SEO legend, and I’m going to be putting this one past Rebecca Gill as well, who was back on episode 42, if you want to go and listen to that one on SEO, I’m going to be interested to find out what other SEO experts are saying about this as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I totally agree with you there, Ben, as well on things like speed and something that’s easy to use, that’s visual and highly usable. And I know Google score them really, really highly. And also content is so much more important than, you know, two validation errors.
Ben Pines
There’s also the importance of accessibility. It’s also become a big issue, at least here in Israel, but I think all over the world. And we actually built for our themes an accessibility plugin that became very popular. And I think that’s also an issue that needs to be addressed.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think accessibility as well, where we’re doing the AA checker, that would be where we’re personally looking at the accessibility. So making sure that something can be read by some software, etc. Or also if somebody has got poor eyesight, etc., making sure that the colour tones, etc., are not imbalance, as it were, so that people can’t read it. And that would be— if people want to go and cheque out what that’s all about, there’s a good A-checker. That’s a web accessibility checker, I should say, at achecker.ca. That’s the one that we use as a company. Do you guys have any other recommendations on that?
Ben Pines
No, I don’t. I don’t have anything to check, but cheque out our plugin. It’s really—
Lee Matthew Jackson
Which one’s that? What’s the plugin?
Ben Pines
The accessibility plugin. It only works on Pojo themes, but you should cheque it out and see how it works.
Lee Matthew Jackson
All right, guys. Well, you’ve heard it here first. Check out pojo.me and cheque out the accessibility plugin over at pojo.me that come with the themes over there. And I have to say, they are some classy looking themes. I’m liking the look of those. I’m actually on there right now, mate, just having a quick sneaky peek.
Ben Pines
Cool. They’re also having, as I said, a redo.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Ben Pines
Yeah, right.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So baking in the Elementor plugin as well.
Ben Pines
Exactly.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, nice one. That’s fantastic. So, mate, WordPress— how long have you been using WordPress yourself?
Ben Pines
Wow, years. I think when I first started using WordPress, it was in the SEO firm that I worked, and we just created so many, you know, I think, sites that were on the verge of spam but weren’t actually spam, you know, like content Content back then was, was different. I mean, you just publish any article and get ranking immediately. Yeah, so I was the first in my company to actually use WordPress on large, large scale, but this was— it was more, it was more known for blogs and people didn’t use it for, for websites at all. And still today I get people that don’t believe that WordPress can be used for large and more complicated websites.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I do hear that still even today. I do remember the days as well when you could build a WordPress website and shut your eyes for 5 seconds and then go to Google and find it.
Ben Pines
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. That was a long time ago.
Ben Pines
The sweet old days.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. The sweet old days. You see, at that point, I thought that WordPress was the magic sauce as well. I thought that if you built an HTML site, you would never get into Google. But if you built a WordPress site, for some reason, it seemed to be in Google really quickly. So back then, how old was I? Well, I was still a teenager. Was I? No, early 20s. So I was just doing everything in WordPress that I could. So did you get involved in the builds then of WordPress sites yourself or were you mainly just doing the keyword analysis and all that sort of stuff with SEO?
Ben Pines
Yeah, everything.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Everything.
Ben Pines
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So are you a 100% geek coder as well?
Ben Pines
I’m a light geek coder. I wouldn’t say— I think maybe I’m saying I won’t call myself a developer or coder because of the great developers that we have in the team, so I will never compare to those. But if you’re doing a bit on the front end and you’re hacking away through plugins, you can call yourself sort of a coder.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think you could call yourself a coder. And bear in mind, that’s the way most of us have started. So that’s exactly how I started myself, was being a non-developer working with WordPress and trying to work out ways to change it and looking at other plugins and how they did and then essentially learnt PHP and went from there, really.
Ben Pines
Exactly. I’m a lazy coder. I mean, I think I could learn how to do it properly, but I much prefer, you know, plugins. The last one I used was Gravity Forms to create some sort of quiz, and it was so simple, so easy. It just drives you out of trying and wanting to be, you know, to improve your coding skills.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Exactly. The Gravity Forms itself is phenomenal because of all the conditionality, etc., you can do. Workflows and the plugins they’ve got for that as well for quite cheap as well. You get the whole bundle.
Ben Pines
Exactly. I was looking through the various options to create a quiz and one of the options was a service, you know, a SaaS company that offered it for something like, I think, $50 a month, something like that, and you know, Gravity Forms is so much cheaper and it’s so much better because you know what you’re getting. And you’re getting the company and the support and a well-known company that you can trust.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s so true. And just think about this as well. I mean, if you’ve got Gravity Forms that’s that powerful, you can buy a developer licence, you can find a niche community, and then you could create your own website offering those people on, say, a multi-site platform to say, hey guys, come and use our polling system or our quiz system for only $50 a month. And you could use the power of Gravity Forms to do that for you. So you have never actually developed anything. Other than you’ve paid for your developer licence and you’re receiving all of your Gravity Form updates and you’re just answering any support tickets. So there you go, there’s a free business idea for anyone who’s thinking about it. The reason why I say that is I’ve seen this happen quite a few times now. I’ve even seen this in Beaver Builder circles where some companies now are actually setting up as online companies offering a Wix-style service for particular niches. So there’s a chap from Germany who I’m going to be interviewing in a few weeks’ time on the podcast. He’ll be talking about his— it’s Mee Sites, M-E-E Sites. Sites.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So he’s got a niche community where he’s created something. So he’s had not had to actually build Beaver Builder itself, but he has built the kind of the infrastructure, the multi-site and providing the service that goes with that as well. And that’s one of the things I really love about WordPress. I love about open source that people have got the power to do that and to, to create these sorts of services.
Ben Pines
There’s actually a guy in France that contacted us that has a startup that is using Elementor for people to actually— yeah, it behaves the same as Wix. You get a hosting, you get with one click, you get hosting, you get all the Elementor templates plus templates that he made by himself. Brilliant.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Do you know the URL of that? Could we share that with the listeners?
Ben Pines
Yeah, it’s themecloud.io.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Thinkloud—
Ben Pines
No, ThemeCloud.
Lee Matthew Jackson
ThemeCloud. I thought you said ThinkCloud. ThemeCloud.io. Let’s cheque this guy out. There you go. Already a nice use of stock photography there. That’s excellent. All right. I’ll cheque this out as well. But that’s so cool though, isn’t it? You can be somebody who has not had the amount of money to invest in a complicated product build, but you can use something in the open source world and then create value, can’t you? And create a really cool online service service for a particular niche. And this, you know, this Themecloud offers a solution to people already for quite a low cost. I mean, they already— it looks like they bundle in free templates and then add a whole load of extras or stuff. But, you know, this is answering a service for those sorts of people in a particular niche that need to be able to build a site but can’t necessarily do all of the design or the groundwork themselves. So this is really cool. I like this. I’ll put this one in the show notes as well, but it’s themecloud.io if you want to go and cheque out a company that has taken on Elementor already and started to build a software as a service solution.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And that is such a cool idea. I’m just taking a look now at the pricing as well. Quite reasonable pricing as well, but it’s a great way for, for businesses like ourselves to use something in the open source world. It’s not a bad idea. It’s a great idea because you’re able to offer the whole service around it of support, of hosting and the backups and that, and take all the pressure away away from other people using these sorts of services. Oh man, that is so exciting. So what’s been the biggest challenge for you guys over the last year, year and a half running Pojo and launching Elementor? What’s been the biggest challenge for you guys?
Ben Pines
There were many challenges. You know, I can’t think of one single challenge, but I think deciding on exactly— like, the company was— the founders of the company, one is a developer and the other is a designer. So it was a challenge to, to get the right mix between the two. So, so the, the biggest challenge I think was to create a product that both catered for the need of designers that want more capabilities, that want to, you know, the move from Photoshop to WordPress to, to be as smooth as possible, as well as cater to the more beginner and novice crowd that just started out and want to create their landing page and their simple website.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, that— you’ve just said something that, that kind of sparked a thought in my brain. I don’t know why this hasn’t happened before, but you said making the kind of the, the transition from Photoshop to web easier. Do you see a day where designers will be designing in Elementor?
Ben Pines
Well, definitely. I mean, we’re doing it in our company. And there are great prototyping tools like InVision and people are using Sketch and Photoshop. And the best, I think the transition is so much faster to go from these programmes to, which are prototyping software, they are still important. To go to WordPress, the switch for us is much faster. It’s a matter of, you know, coming down from one day to a few hours.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So for the design process, you guys still, you’ll still prototype before you then build anything out in Elementor?
Ben Pines
Well, usually first they will prototype it in Photoshop and then, yeah, our designer will, will create the same thing on Elementor.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I get you. Okay. I was just wondering, because these tools seem to be coming very flexible. I mean, I can imagine me designing something in Divi and Beaver Builder in Elementor quite easily, just being able to drag and drop elements in, change colours, etc., move things around, and then send it to the client and say, “Hey, what do you think of this?” And then they ask me to amend something. In theory, it’s not a big issue because I’ve got the tools to be able to amend it instantly and the code is already done. And I can just feel coders around the world shuddering, worrying.
Ben Pines
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
What about my code?
Ben Pines
Yeah, for me as a marketer, I think marketers are less likely to use, you know, prototyping tools. So for them, my advice would be to plan everything out. I mean, to really give some thought to the layout before you build Elementor so you can decide which, you know, which sections, which columns, and exactly how it will be. Even sketch it out on a piece of paper.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, that is really good advice. So for people who don’t go through a design process, if you do tend to use the theme or a visual builder very quickly from the get-go, do plan out those websites. That is such, such good advice. Drawing it down, sketching it out, even, even drawing it in Google Draw or something, the actual structure, where the content is going to go, etc., so that when you open the visual builder, you are not kind of making it up as you go along, because an unplanned page can tend to not look quite as attractive as you maybe thought it would in your head. Whereas if you’ve got something on paper that you can then translate into the visual builder, that’s going to be 10 times cooler. And also, all the free templates that come with Elementor, you can steal parts of that. Steal the ideas that are there. You can make anything— I pretty much imagine you can make anything you want to do. You guys have really shook up the market, I think. It’s really quite interesting to see something so powerful. Come out when we’ve got who I consider currently the king of Beaver Builder, but you guys have certainly come in there and shook up the market a lot.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I imagine a lot of people will be drawn towards checking out your product and taking a look at it and maybe even trying it out, especially looking at ThinkCloud— sorry, not ThinkCloud, what am I talking about? ThemeCloud. Talking about ThemeCloud, you know, already within 3 months somebody has launched something with your product, that shows the trust they’ve got in your product already, that they will offer a service based on that. That’s amazing. Should be applauded. So how often do you give yourselves a pat on the back?
Ben Pines
Every day before I drink coffee, I look at myself in the mirror and say, good job.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Seriously, mate, I am really impressed. Good job. And the reason why I say this is because I launched a product like 2, 3 years ago and sold zero. I made something in WordPress, sold nothing, and I know how hard it is to get out there. I then offered a free product and hardly got any take-ups on that. I’ve got a new product out now which I’ve built because it’s something we’ve used internally. We’ve made quite a few sales, etc. I’ve not been pushing it all the time, but I do know that to actually get attention in a very crowded market is very difficult, and you guys have done something very, very well. Just let your founders know that and maybe talk about pay raise and stuff like that.
Ben Pines
Yeah, definitely.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. Okay, mate. Well, we try and keep these podcasts to around 30 to 40 minutes because we know a lot of people are driving. And I know that because I sometimes get Snapchats of people who are showing their podcast on in their car. So hey, Ashley, thank you for the Snapchat the other day. And that is really exciting to see the podcast and hear the voices of me and our guests echoing into people’s car. So as people are driving, mate, because most people are, I imagine, what would be some really good pearl of wisdom that you would like to share with listeners? Something that you think will have an impact on their lives or an action that they could take that would make a difference? And then we will get your contact details and we’ll say goodbye.
Ben Pines
Well, actually, we are just coming up, coming out with a kit that I think people will find very, very useful. So that’s my advice to get like a free kit.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So tell us about the free kit.
Ben Pines
It’s a set of hero scenes, a template of 12 hero scenes that we’re releasing. And I think we’re releasing it with a post with 12 actionable advice for starting out. People start out with design and it has some hidden explanations about how to use Elementor in a new and more original way. Way. So I think this will— people find it very useful.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So guys, normally you’ll hear someone say something like wax on, wax off, paint the face or events red, or Mr. Miyagi style statements. But today it’s different. Head on over to— where is this live yet? Can we get these?
Ben Pines
It’s not live yet, but it will be, I hope. When is this podcast out?
Lee Matthew Jackson
This podcast is out in 2 weeks from this date of recording.
Ben Pines
Ah, okay. So it will be on the blog on the Elementor blog.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Excellent. Head on over to elementor.com/blog. So you’ve got some hero templates, um, help with design, good advice on design. So that’s very good for us developers who sometimes struggle with the design side. And then also some little clever tricks on how to use Elementor in ways that maybe you weren’t thinking. That’s pretty cool. I’m looking forward to that one. So if that’s live as well, we’ll make sure that we get that post in the show notes as well for the date of go-live. And that’s awesome. So mate, how can people connect with you guys?
Ben Pines
Well, there’s a new group called Elementors. We actually didn’t open it, but it’s a great way to join the community. Also, you can, if you’re translators, you can help translate Elementor to other languages. Contact our support, [email protected], and then subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube We also have a YouTube with a lot of cool tutorials.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Awesome. So you can go into Facebook and run a search for Elementors. You’ll find them in there, and I’m sure you guys will be happy to add us. I’ve already just put in my application to join there, mate. And also [email protected]. If you can offer that translation service, that would be fantastic. And it’s so important, I think, as a WordPress community, if we do have skills that we can help other people out with. That’s a fantastic opportunity. So [email protected]. Mate, you’ve been a legend. I’m so excited to carry on using this product and finding out more about it. And perhaps we can have you on again in a few months’ time when you’ve added some more features and we can talk about those. That’d be great.
Ben Pines
Sure, sure. I’d love to.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wicked. Have a brilliant day, mate, and take care of yourself.
Ben Pines
Okay.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cheers.
Ben Pines
Bye-bye.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So there you are. Head on over to leejacksondev.com/support. /Group. Let’s talk about W3C. Does it matter to your clients? Does it matter anymore? Did Ben have a case? I don’t know. What do you think? LeeJacksonDev.com/Group. Let’s all talk about this. Now then, don’t forget to head on over to LeeJacksonDev.com/October to be notified of when we launch our 31 episodes of WordPress Tips to Try Before You Die. Culminating in an amazing tip on Halloween, a scary tip on Halloween. Don’t know why I said that. I’ve like, I’ve made a rod for my own back. I’ve got to think of something now. Anyway, have a freaking awesome week. Don’t forget to keep innovating. Don’t forget to come and join the Facebook group, and we’ll see you next week on Monday. Bye-bye.
