Not too long ago, building and designing fairly good-looking websites required quite a bit of coding knowledge. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were pretty much mandatory.
But with website builders like Elementor, that’s no longer the case. Building a great website is mostly a matter of dragging and dropping now.
However, if you want to get serious about designing your website, you should leave it to the experts. Besides the overall aesthetics of a website, your design needs to turn first-time visitors into customers or loyal users of your website.
We advise contacting Digital Silk, the web design agency in Chicago that won our collective hearts.
If all you need is more of a basic website, Elementor is one of the best do-it-yourself options available. Throughout that journey, you might also have in mind a lead for improving your web design. With that said, let’s talk about a few tips that will help you use Elementor more effectively.
- Third-Party Add-Ons
Although Elementor is a plug-in, it’s a popular one, and there are plenty of third-party add-ons available, which can expand your design options. This especially comes in handy if you’re using the free version of the plug-in.
With these add-ons, you may no longer need to upgrade to the premium versions to get access to a broader range of customization features. For example, a plug-in that will be very useful in your projects is WunderWP.
This plug-in allows you to save the styles and templates you created and save them in its cloud, which means you can reuse them in future projects. And that’s very important.
After all, you wouldn’t want to spend time recreating the things you’ve already done. Furthermore, this plug-in comes with 134 Element styles for the free version of Elementor.
- Templates
Building a website from the ground up will take you quite a bit of time, which is not always worth it, especially when there are a ton of templates at your disposal.
Even if you don’t want to use templates as they come, you can still customize them to your liking or get a bit of inspiration from them.
What’s more, you’ve got access to two different kinds of templates. You can either import a web page and its content in full or download only a part of it, like the contact us section of a web page.
You can either find these templates on Elementor Template Library or using other markets, like the Envato market.
- Hotkeys
Even though you’ll have to learn the hotkeys, it’s worth the effort. Pressing a few buttons is much faster than dragging your mouse from one end of the screen to the other.
Besides simple shortcuts, like copy or paste, you can use advanced ones as well. Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + M will get you to Mobile Editing, for example. Whereas Cmd/Ctrl + ? will open up the Keyboard Shortcuts Help window.
- The Color Palette
Having a consistent color scheme throughout your website is something you’ll need to look out for, as they’re your brand colors. This means that every page, button, or widget needs to respect a certain color palette.
In some cases, you would have to copy and paste or remember the color code every time you apply a new widget, which is time-consuming.
However, with Elementor’s Color Picker, you can define your colors and use these whenever you need them.
- The Navigator
Elementor’s Navigator is yet another feature that will make the web development process faster, especially if you’re building long pages or use a multi-layered design.
This is a navigation tree panel that gives you easy access to every element on the editor. As a result, you can drag elements throughout the page and edit them without much effort. You could even edit most of your page by only using the Navigator.
You can access Navigator by either using the Cmd/Ctrl + I shortcut, right-clicking on any element, and then clicking on Navigator or by clicking on the elements button in the panel’s footer.
- Responsive Mode
Mobile devices generate over 50% of all web traffic. So, making your website responsive is important for ensuring a consistent user experience across all types of devices. Well, with Elementor, you can do that with just a few clicks.
Elementor provides you with the Responsive Mode that you can access at the bottom of the toolbar. This allows you to visualize and edit the look of your website on desktops, tablets, and mobiles.
Keep in mind the Responsive Mode’s editing is done top-down, which means that the changes you’ve made for desktop will work on tablets, and the adjustments you’ve made on tablets will move over to mobile phones as well.
This does not go the other way around, meaning that you can adjust the look of your website so that it looks the best on every type of device.
- Elementor Finder
When designing multiple pages at the same time, switching between by saving a page, going back to the dashboard, searching for the page you’re looking for, and then opening it will take up a lot of your time if you do it repeatedly.
You can save yourself some time by using the Elementor Finder, which allows you to simply type in what you’re looking for. You can access this feature by pressing Cmd/Ctrl + E.
- Global Rows
Global rows are helpful when you want to display the same row on multiple locations of your website. But why is that? Well, if you’re not using this feature, every small change you make in one row will not be applied to the others.
So, if you’re using the same CTA row on multiple locations, for example, you’ll have to edit it over and over again until you cover all of the locations where it’s displayed. But with global rows, every change you on one row will automatically port over to the other rows as well.
- Filter Effects
If you’ve just started using Elementor, you might think that you can only change the size, alignment, and width of the images you want to display on your website.
However, to make them look better on the page, you can also do some basic editing, like changing the brightness, saturation, or contrast of the image, without having to use a third-party image editor
This can be done by using CSS Filters, which you can find in the Style tab of the image widget.
- Elementor Tags
Elementor tags allow you to create a semantic HTML document that will help search engines determine the context and significance of your content. So, make sure to use them properly.
Although most people generally use div for just about anything, which is a general-purpose markup, there are plenty of other tags you can use.
For example, article can be used to define blocks of content like blog posts or comments, nav should be used to mark a navigation menu, or aside for sidebars.
- Final Words
All in all, due to its versatility and ease of use, Elementor is one of the best page builders for WordPress.
Hopefully, with the tips we’ve shown you today, you’ll get to make the most out of it.
Author bio:
Tomas is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. His work is focusing on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels.
Source: Unsplash
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