Elementor is one of the best website building tools available today for WordPress. It offers easy and intuitive visual editing, thousands of pre-made templates, and completely flexible design capabilities.
There’s no doubt that combining WordPress with Elementor is an ideal solution for anyone who wants to easily build impressive and visually attractive websites. But even with these excellent tools, many people still struggle with the design.
Therefore, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to walk you step-by-step through planning and implementing professional design for a WordPress website using Elementor:
Initial Planning
Before starting to design, it’s important to define the purpose of the website, its target audiences, and the functions it’s meant to serve. Only then can proper decisions be made regarding the site’s structure, design template, and required elements.
Before starting to actually design the site with Elementor, it’s essential to dedicate time for initial planning. This stage is key for building solid foundations on which we can later “hang” impressive designs.
I highly recommend doing the following:
- Clearly defining the purpose of the site and its goals. For example, is the goal to generate leads, sell products or just showcase a brand.
- Thoroughly characterizing the target audiences – age, gender, interests etc. A website aimed at children will look different than one aimed at adults.
- Defining content and functionality – detailing the pages, sections, applications and elements required to achieve the site’s goals among the target audiences.
- Creating an initial site-map or flowchart to illustrate the hierarchical structure of the site’s content.
In-depth execution of these steps will greatly ease working with Elementor later on and minimize risks for errors and misunderstandings when building and designing the website.
Choosing a Template (Theme)
The template largely determines the overall look and feel of the site. Elementor includes dozens of free and premium quality templates to choose from. Be sure to select the one that best suits the style and purposes of the planned site.
- The template chosen in Elementor basically determines the look and feel of the entire site. This is one of the most important decisions in the entire process.
- The most common mistake is choosing a template based only on visual considerations like modernity or “wow” factor. Instead, I recommend a more methodical selection process:
- Match the template’s style to the objectives and nature of the site defined during planning.
- Ensure the template fully supports required functionality according to your needs.
- Must choose a template with full RTL support (right-to-left for Hebrew).
It’s usually stated in the template’s description whether it supports RTL. - Verify the template is responsive and adapts to mobile devices.
- Prefer templates updated to the latest WordPress and Elementor versions.
- Read user reviews to confirm it’s a quality and stable template.
- The more time invested now in choosing properly, the more future frustration and time-waste will be saved.
Colors and Fonts
The selected colors and fonts greatly influence the site’s character and readability. Choose a harmonious color palette with 2-3 main colors and a clean, readable font. Combining serif (headings) and classical (body text) fonts usually works well.
Elements and Widgets
Elementor includes thousands of templates for elements like headlines, buttons, tables, bars and more. Simply drag the desired element to a site column and visually adapt it to the overall design.
Leveraging Ready Elements and Widgets for Significant Time-Saving in Development
One of Elementor’s powerful capabilities is its built-in element library – headlines, tables, images, and dozens more common components.
Instead of building each element from scratch or relying on code and CSS, simply drag a ready-made widget onto the site. This will save you considerable time:
Quick styling and design adjustments
Harnessing built-in features like responsiveness
Minimizing bugs and code errors
Saving future development and maintenance resources
It’s highly recommended to abundantly leverage the rich element library starting from the early development stages. This will streamline the process and prevent many unnecessary headaches.
Proper Integration of Colors and Fonts for Optimal User Experience
The design of a WordPress website consists of two key visual components: colors and fonts.
Choosing them correctly is critical for creating a better user experience:
- Colors – Best to pick a harmonious palette of 2-3 core shades. Ensure adequate contrast between text and background colors. Consider using complementary hues or brand signature colors.
- Fonts – Recommended to choose a clear and readable font for long text and a more interesting one for headings. Combine serif and classic fonts; ensure font sizes are proportionate to content importance.
With some extra effort at this stage, the website’s reading and navigation experience can become much more enjoyable and inviting to users.
Page Template Layout
It’s best to build a unified template that includes all repetitive design elements and settings – like the logo, main menu, footer location etc. This will make applying that template to all pages much easier later on.
Developing Templates for Time-Saving and Design Consistency in WordPress Sites
A template allows saving a full configuration of a page – elements, design, display and more. You can then easily apply the same template to all other site pages with one click!
Benefits of using templates:
- Full consistency in site design
- Massive time-saving in development and maintenance
- Global control of elements site-wide
Optimization for speed and performance
In summary, templates are key for faster and simpler development of large-scale sites with Elementor – definitely worth utilizing to the max!
Flexible and Responsive Design
Ensure your site looks good and functions properly on mobile devices and screens with different resolutions. Elementor comes with responsive design tools to leverage fully.
Optimal Responsive Design for Superior User Experience on Any Device
- Today over 60% of web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. Therefore, delivering a good mobile user experience is essential.
- This is one of the reasons Elementor is such an excellent WordPress site building tool – it includes an intuitive, easy-to-use responsive design system:
- Creating breakpoints for automatic rearrangement of elements based on screen size
- Full control over every component’s placement, sizing, hiding and display per breakpoint
- Cross-device “live” editing capabilities
Be sure to harness Elementor’s built-in tools to guarantee your WordPress site looks and performs flawlessly on any size device!
This has been just a brief taste of the full process of designing WordPress websites with Elementor. Many more points and details need to be addressed in order to achieve truly impressive results.