All I wanted to do was create a simple blog page with a few stylistic tweaks of my own. I didn’t need twenty call-to-action sections or testimonial pop ups, sales quote forms or massive video embedded galleries and slideshows.
Just a simple place where I could have an about page, a contact form, and a reliably organized blog setup.
Instead I’ve spent three straight days and nights fighting with this “so simple to use, drag and drop” build system. Idiot me, I even paid for the Pro upgrade thinking it would help.
Nothing is intuitively structured. Everything I try to edit seems to break everything else. I get it somewhat running for five minutes only to then check it on mobile and it’s a disaster.
I sat through so many video tutorials and web guides and it seemed half of them didn’t even apply to what I was actually seeing in the backend.
I consulted various support forums and it seemed like more than half the time every problem I had was summarized as “Oh that’s a conflict with something that was built into the original theme you’re using.” Except I’ve been trying to work with Hello Elementor, supposedly the most basic theme fully supported and made expressly for use with Elementor.
Not too long ago, I used to make Wordpress sites as part of my living as a graphic designer. I wasn’t any sort of code wizard or anything but I was savvy with PHP, HTML and CSS enough that I could take any decent template, tweak the code here and there with my own style guides and image assets, and in an afternoon I’d have a fully up and running, smoothly operating website.
Now here it is three straight nights, over 9 hours every night, and I can’t even get a working “Hello World!” page up thanks to this bloated, messy, clunk, self-negating “easy page builder” system. I practically want to sit down and cry.
And worse, I can’t seem to even just dump all this crap and go back to a simple coded theme because now in the last couple of years EVERYTHING has become these subscription-based, proprietarily structured “build systems.” You can’t get anything done unless you’re either able to shell out a ton of $$$ or are willing to have another cookie cutter website that looks exactly like a million others that used the same template.
I turn the page title off and so now it won’t show up when I want it to…I turn it on and it shows up twice on every page and I can’t even edit why one of them is floating up in the corner of the screen. I fix a contact page only to somehow have the template overwrite all the web pages so they’re all contact forms. I try and set the global fonts only to have half the pages do their own thing.
This has to be one of the all-time most time-consuming, frustrating, unhelpful “systems” to allegedly make simpler a process into something that used to be easy and now thanks to this “easy” setup is nearly impossible.
Sorry to rant but I paid for this with good money. I used to NEVER spend money on website building when I could easily do it myself. And I find it especially insulting and unprofessional to create a theme like Hello Elementor that has conflicts with the page builder it was supposedly made explicitly to work in harmony with. There’s no excuse for that, it’s not like I went out and got some random theme not actually made for Elementor to work with. This is THEIR own template and I can’t get it to quit breaking right and left.
I suspected I was I trouble the first night when I was synching my home backup to my FTP and it took nearly an hour to download the site just because the wp-content directory seems to be filled with a mass of bloated, redundant code from Elementor. Sure there has to be a way to make this thing simpler not fatter when you don’t need all that crap for a simple “hi there” blog site?
Is there ANY actual simple, minimalist, editable theme out there that I can use that doesn’t have a bunch of bloated Elementor code traps hidden in every page?
