What is Divi?
When you think of “website builder,” what comes to mind? If you’re the layperson, it’s probably not Divi.
You might be thinking of some of the more common names in the industry, like Squarespace or Wix, but they’re not quite what we’re covering today. These products are entire website platforms — they have their own builders within them.
At Formada, the main platform we use to build out websites on is WordPress. Divi is a website building framework that lives within the WordPress content management system (CMS) platform.
Our team prefers Divi for a number of reasons, one of them being that Divi gives our designers the perfect balance between plug and play, templated elements and highly custom features. It’s essentially a tool that we use to create a website or web page structure without having to write HTML code.
Think of it this way: If WordPress is your website’s house, then Divi is its decor.
Some of those decorative elements are off-the-shelf, some are customizable, and others are completely custom.
With a Divi website from Formada, you get a totally unique website that is flexible, functional, and designed to support your business goals.
That’s good information, but I wanted to dive a little deeper and learn directly from our Design Team why they like using Divi to build sites. In order to do so, I sat down with Formada VP of Design, David Kerr and Web Designer, Vicki Tolmacheva, to get the scoop on why they believe Divi is the right product for building a more effective website.
Why Does Formada Choose Divi To Build Client Websites?
David: Divi is a great builder. It has a lot of the tools that other website builders have, but is flexible enough to do things that builders aren’t expecting you to do.
And a lot of builders, when you go outside of those boundaries, things can go off the rails really quickly — they aren’t able to maintain the base-level stuff of the site.
But Divi can handle custom coding or using custom layouts, like integrating flex box things within their module tools to really overhaul the way that it works, while still being able to use the builder tools that make things really streamlined and easy.
If you’re going to create a new website section with a two-column layout, you can often drag these elements in place vs. looking at code on the back end and interpreting what that’s going to create on the front end. You can actually see what the page is going to look like while you’re building it.
In my experience, Divi is really solid with the basics while also being really easy to customize and override. It has this wide market of people who have created new modules, so even if Divi doesn’t have a particular carousel module tool, someone has developed one for it.
There’s a pretty robust ecosystem of developers who have created extensions to make Divi even more powerful.
It’s on the top level of what its capabilities are, but it’s very extendable, depending on the person using it and their level of expertise with website development.
Has Formada Ever Considered A Different Builder Than DIvi?
David: Yeah, we definitely have, even though Garrett set Formada up using Divi pretty much from day-one.
But a few different times now I’ve done an investigation on what our other WordPress-compatible options are. What are other themes similar to Divi that we could use?
And after doing so, what I found was that there wasn’t enough of a benefit to warrant a migration away from Divi.
Not only does Divi have the best tools, but there’s also the benefit of being consistent with the tools you’re working with across your clients.
I’d say 90-95% of our clients are using Divi. There’s only a handful of clients that aren’t.
Having a consistent builder across the clients you’re supporting helps to make us more effective, to be quicker to make the updates that people need — there’s that huge efficiency piece there.
And in terms of the 5% that aren’t on a Divi site, it’s typically because their site was already built before they became a Formada client. Maybe a website rebuild isn’t yet feasible. Or maybe it’s a Shopify site, and their e-commerce needs are better served by a non-Divi design.
But that said, Divi does provide robust support for e-commerce. We do e-commerce design for WordPress with WooCommerce tools, but for certain business needs, it’s more straightforward to use Shopify.
Divi Tools Have Simplified The Process Of Customization
Vicki: Echoing what David has already touched on, I just have to say how much I like the customizability of Divi.
I worked with a few other builders before, and with Divi you can use its custom code features to style pretty much anything that a client could want.
I feel like with Divi, you can mostly do most things I don’t know, like, including custom code in a relatively simple way, if you know how to use it. Other builders are more complicated.
And it’s been around for a while! There are tutorials for all the issues you can possibly run into.
I won’t go so far as to say there are no issues with Divi, but so many people have used it that there is a ton of support in helping you fix whatever that issue might be.
That gives me reassurance that Divi is something that’s really good for customers. There’s a lot of wisdom and experience behind that software.
If a client wanted something really unique for their website, I would have confidence in knowing that there’s some parallel example out there that I could use to achieve whatever the client’s goal might be.
I could count on one hand the number of times that we’ve had to go back to a client and tell them that we couldn’t do what they wanted with Divi’s builder tools.
It’s modular enough that it’s very efficient for us as designers, but it never feels templated. It never feels like we’re sacrificing the client’s brand. It’s always totally unique to their needs.
Divi Makes It Easy For Clients To Manage Certain Website Elements
David: I should also add that we have a few clients that like to edit their own websites.
Not, like, completely redeveloping everything, but when it comes to changing pictures or changing copy, the Divi Page Builder is relatively simple to use, even for someone who isn’t super tech savvy.
I think that it’s great for people who want to do that themselves.
Vicki: I just wanted to add one last thing. With the Divi Theme Builder, you can create a template for a blog post, and someone else can go in, post their blogs, and the post will render exactly how you styled it with the exact structure that was designed.
We have a few clients that have a few different styles of articles that they like to publish, by using the Theme Builder, the client can just go into their site, add their text to the particular type of article that they want published, and the text perfectly adheres to the structure of the design.
There are just so many different things you can do with it. It’s really great for us as designers and for clients who want to make certain updates to their site.
You deserve a website that grows your business. Our team specializes in exactly that. If you’d like to learn more about our website services, contact us today!