Hello everyone!

Thanks for reading my first blog post.

As part of the SAC challenge we are supposed to post to our blog weekly. I don't know why I have avoided this before, maybe because I feel everyone here is so knowledgeable I wouldn't have much to contribute. So I decided to share my experience using the Divi Wordpress theme.

I bought the Divi theme!!

Last November, on Black Friday, I invested in the Divi wordpress theme. It was something I wanted to buy for months, I heard a lot of great things about this theme and it was a good deal compared to the regular prices. I did not get the lifetime membership, I only subscribed for one year of updates to the theme and plugins to see how I would like it before spending all the money for the lifetime.

When the Affiliate Challenge started I uploaded it to the blog I started for this challenge. I have been messing around with it for a few weeks trying to get it just how I wanted it. It seemed like everyday I was not moving forward in the challenge because I was trying to make this perfect website.

So about 3 days ago I switched back to a free theme that was a lot simpler.

What was wrong?

I feel like you can make some beautiful pages with Divi but it is a lot of work. Every single page or post I try with this theme (on 2 different blogs) has taken a ton of time. I would not say I am experienced all that much with wordpress, I have never done any coding or changed that much with my websites, so maybe someone with more experience would have an easier time with this.

You could go with the easy way and just post a regular post, which I did end up doing for some things, but then I feel like you have this theme that can do so much and you are wasting it.

The theme itself is set up in modules, which then have rows inside the module, then inside the rows are sections. You can customize the backgrounds of the modules, rows and sections. The sections are the areas where you add your text, images or whatever content you want, you can add blurbs, buttons....

In the end separating the sections into text areas was too much work instead of just writing out a blog post and adding images. The few pages I did put the time into (hours) I was not really happy with the end result. I am sure I could still mess around with them and come up with a page I love but I don't want to spend hours arranging and designing a post every single time.

Would I recommend Divi?

I think if you have some experience with website building, you might love Divi. I would probably recommend it if you were building a website for a brick and mortar business where you would just be making a website and not continually putting up content.

For a blog type of business that you will post a lot of content, I would recommend something that will be easier to post more often and you don't have to design something every single post. They do have some templates you can use for your website but those too seemed like a lot of work. You can change them to work for you with your own branding but it would initially be a lot of work setting up templates to use for regular posts.

Will I continue my subscription?

In November, when my subscription ends I have the option to pay for the lifetime membership at a pro rated price. I can do that now also, I don't have to wait until November and the cost for the first year is pro rated from the lifetime subscription for updates for themes and plugins.

I will probably not continue using Divi. If I made a lot of landing pages in my business I would probably continue the subscription but I think to just have the theme for blog posts is not the best use of my money, the theme is expensive.

I also wanted to mention the site says it has a ton of other themes. The themes they have are not ready to use, you get PSD files and you have to change things to your own branding. I also found this was a lot more work than I wanted to do.

Do you use Divi? How do you like it? I would love to hear what others think or if there is some secret to make it easier to use.