Image by: Alexis Diaz - Artwork in Shoreditch, England
I don't mean for this post to be denigrating or diminishing in any way, the mere fact that you are entering this space with the intention to build useful, beautiful sites with the skills currently available to you is laudable, and you should be proud of any work you do that pays you and results in your client, and you, being satisfied with the result.
What I'm hoping to convey is a desire to see you take your work to its logical next step, learning to code. To ditch the confines of Divi, Elementor, WPBakery etc and allow yourself to create freely. Making sites and web applications that conform to your imagination and not the dictates of these pagebuilders.
My reason for this is that I see, almost daily, requests from pagebuilder users, on various social media and message boards, seeking to extend the functionality of their systems or becoming desperate at the inability to apply basic layout patterns because the system simply won't do it short of littering an auxiliary stylesheet with overrides. Personally, my work has an increasing amount of requests for conversion of elementor etc sites to PHP templates coupled with custom post types and fields. Ostensibly because clients simply do not have the time to learn a pagebuilder and its simpler for them to fill a field that says 'industry type' or click on 'upload banner image' without worrying about knocking a row / column / grid item out of place. Further, removing the bloat of elementor or similar can increase your pagespeed score by huge amounts, super important with the Core Web Vitals update.
I'm not about to say that code is simple, it takes time to get used to it, it requires a large amount of practice and a willingness to create, break, fix, repeat.
When I shifted from editing paid themes with basic pagebuilders I broke everything, all the time until I didn't. The first time I was able to build a WordPress site from scratch as per a supplied PSD, I experienced a professional satisfaction like none before, as simplistic as the design was.
Further, the possibilities for increased remuneration for the increased skills is excellent and a chief motivator, the ability to now create projects that are useful, highly functional and beautiful, is an immensely validating achievement and is in within the reach of anyone willing to put in the time.
If anyone is interested I will be posting bite-size and longer form tutorials on how to get into this, with a focus on WordPress customization. Please bear with me as I make them, as my will is strong but my time is limited, so I will make them as fast as I can.
I really hope to be of use in the coming months and share the bits and pieces that I've learned through failure and success.
Til then, good luck and keep at it. :)
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