Today I added a new Astra Elementor Pro Hair Salon Website. It’s built from one of the Astra Sites websites with a change in color scheme, images and text. One of the great things about where Elementor and Astra are taking us is the ability to template pre-built websites much like builders use model homes to build customizable, high quality, but low building cost houses. Working from templates, I can deliver 5 page premium websites for $350 whereas a typical “premium agency” working with their own themes charge as much as $5000.
Let’s talk a bit about those “agency themes”. I end up doing a lot of maintenance for sites using these themes. Invariably, the have not passed the WordPress quality check that is required for all free themes on WordPress.org Themes. That may not be a bad thing but it is still a step missing in quality assurance for the backbone of your website. Similarly, much of what can be done with Elementor and the Astra Pro theme is done with a bunch of templates that are customized for specific pages. I just finished a maintenance customization on a site like that were the owner of the site couldn’t even create a basic additional page. ?
Along those same lines of “designer as developer” coding incompetence, consider this question posted in the Facebook Elementor group, “Hi there! Is it posible in elementor to create a button that when you press goes to another part of the same page? Thanks!!”. That’s a shame. Anyone who has taken an HTML 101 course knows that is handled with an Anchor ID.
The beauty of my design and development approach with Astra Elementor Pro is that I can fully utilize my HTML5, CSS and JS skills but leave the client a site that is easy to edit – for about the cost of cheap offshore “custom” development!