Theme Builders: Which one (if any) to use?

January 1, 2016 3:24 PM

Metafilter Wordpress peoples: Tell me of your experiences in using any of the following:

• Divi
• Headway
• Ultimatum

I'm interested in hearing about ease of use and learning curve, level &/or limitations of customization, quality of support, lean or bloaty code, value for money, and any other things you may think are important.

Context: I have a client who is interested in learning how to use one of these to make a site. I have not used any of them, so am looking for experienced feedback before choosing one over another.

Background: I know Wordpress and can customize a theme easily via CSS and PHP. I have read the documentation for each theme builder (or theme, for Divi) above and have read reviews for all. Now I want to hear the wisdom/experience of the Hive Mind.

Thanks!

posted by jammy to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Divi + judicious use of shortcodes is an absolute *dream* for putting together complex pages without having to break out custom templates or hiring someone to do coding for you. The only downside I've found is that it can be a little slow (even with caching). That might be a side effect of my host, though.
posted by soma lkzx at 3:49 PM on January 1, 2016

Oh, and I've found Divi is more focused on "hey we're a business or portfolio check out these tables of things and stuff" as opposed to organizing collections of blog posts, which I found to be rather difficult. We ended up going with some grid plugin in the end that could be used with shortcodes, but understanding that something magazine-y is going to take additional work outside of standard Divi might save you a headache.
posted by soma lkzx at 3:51 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I launched my first Divi site a few months ago. Once I wrapped my head around their method of building pages, it was fairly easy. I liked it enough to buy the lifetime license and I'll probably use Divi rather than StudioPress themes for my future clients. There are several very helpful Divi groups on facebook.

Elegant Themes also has a new-ish "Divi Builder" plugin that lets you use their page building tools with any theme. This might also be an option, if your client just wants to manipulate things within a theme that you've built.

I haven't used the other themes you mention.
posted by belladonna at 4:43 PM on January 1, 2016

Divi is pretty versatile for building one of those pages that goes on forever with lots of horizontal slices. It's best for a mostly static page, rather than one that has constantly changing blog-type content. The main reason for this is that on the back end, Divi doesn't show you WYSIWYG but a schematic of your page, so you have to remember which block is which. Again, that's not a problem with a static page but could be an annoyance if you switch out content frequently. It's certainly easy to learn. I'm not familiar with your other options.
posted by beagle at 5:07 PM on January 1, 2016

In Divi, you can opt to just use the standard WP editor rather than the Divi page builder for any given page or post. So you can use the page builder for your main content pages and still use the standard editor for blog posts, which is what I do.
posted by randomkeystrike at 6:19 PM on January 1, 2016

I'll go against the flow-- I am not a fan of Divi, and I've had less than awesome experiences with Elegant Themes code. (I've used their themes off and on for about ten years.) I'd recommend taking a look through the support forums of any theme before you choose it. I personally prefer Beaver Builder for the following reasons:
- I find it faster/easier to use because you can see what you are building while you build it, instead of clicking in and out of an abstracted builder interface
- it seems less prone to breakage when you write custom CSS (I get lots of calls to support Divi sites that started out responsive, but aren't any more after a few rogue lines of CSS; BB code seems more robust in that way)
- most important (to me) their support team is way more responsive, especially if you are trying to figure out any kind of interaction with a 3rd party plugin

ET does have an excellent blog series, though.
posted by instamatic at 7:58 PM on January 1, 2016

Oh, another tip is to run sample/demo sites through speed tests-- if they are official sites, they may be highly optimized, but it will at least give you an idea of what is possible. You can often find portfolios of client sites built with different themes/builders to get an idea of how they might run in the field.
posted by instamatic at 8:23 PM on January 1, 2016

I am not a super techy person--I basically know some CSS and html and have Wordpress familiarity but that's it. I have a blog that I first built with Headway 2.0. It was relatively easy for a person with limited tech skills, although it did require a fair amount of asking questions in the forums. I found Headway 2 easy to use but buggy--the visual editor would randomly close in the middle of designing, or it wouldn't save changes, or switch pages, etc. Mildly frustrating but not enough to cause me to stop.

THEN they released Headway 3.0 and did not have a clear upgrade path for users who built their sites on 2. They promised it was coming, and promised, and promised...several years later, they admitted it was never going to happen, leaving those of us with outdated 2.0 sites having to redesign and start from scratch. I played around with Headway 3 but ultimately decided to redesign and use another theme entirely (Avada). The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth and I felt like it was handled poorly and they didn't do right by their customers. My sense was that it's a very small company so if really robust support is important to you then it might not be the best choice. They just released Headway 4.0 so the product might be much better now, but I have no intention of ever using it again.
posted by Bella Sebastian at 9:25 PM on January 1, 2016

I use Ultimatum for a couple of websites. I found it to have a pretty steep learning curve, but once I mastered that it got easier. It helps that it's built on Bootstrap, which is somewhat familiar to me because I use it for my job, so I can go into the CSS editing screen and fine-tune it with Bootstrap commands.
posted by telophase at 9:12 AM on January 4, 2016

Response by poster: Thank you, good peoples. Your responses were all very helpful, as usual.
posted by jammy at 4:47 PM on January 11, 2016