2017 – What a Year!

Its been a pretty special year for us Divi Theme users. Elegant Themes have issued about 30 updates, each giving us more and more functionality and a few of us (mainly due to cheap hosting, outdated php versions and maybe, just maybe, a little less reading of the manual that should have gone on). Some small, get overable issues.

WordPress has, of course, updated a few times and that has caused us and many users of third-party solutions a few headaches – but, all in all, it has been very positive and we can do more with WordPress now than we have ever been able to do.

Child Theme Development has not slowed down, even with the advent of Divi Cloud for layouts and of course Elegant Themes throwing a spanner in the works for third party devs in that they are now including free layouts every week and soon to release their own layout manager as part of their offering. All this, and still there is a need for more and more designs, layouts, plugins and child themes to enhance an already all-encompassing Theme framework.

The page builders from Elementor to Beaver Builder and all those in the middle including the Divi Builder are doubtless awaiting what WordPress has to offer in the shape of Gutenberg. It would seem that none are afraid and all are working towards building page builders to be even better with little or no css requirements for simple things like shading, box shadows, font integration and more.

Its plain to see for all professionals out there that Divi and its competitors are working hard to make using their products as easy as it can be. With that in mind, perhaps its time for the web hosts to catch up and ensure all hosting plans are ready, willing and able to deal with the extra memory, scripts and dare we say it –  the extra ‘bloat’ that these enhancements bring to us as developers and users.

Clear that Cache!

Of course, we also need our browser suppliers to get with the plan and increase functionality and make sure that our computers do not come to a grinding halt and that caching is more intelligent  – Even being able to turn off browser caching at desktop level so we can all develop a little faster and without the need to ‘refresh’ our browsers every ten minutes or so – we can but dream!

Even with the above being said, we think that the page builder industry is a high-level contributor to an ever-growing economy; it enables us as developers to make sites faster, better, design beautiful layouts (mostly) and of course increase our bottom line. When you think of the cost of these page builders, even the annual payment ones, they are an absolute bargain and frankly, continue to amaze us at the level of innovation provided on a daily basis.

Education

Yes, its hard to see where it is all going to end and if with all these enhancements developers and designers will lose touch with coding skills (use it or lose it, comes to mind) But, if we as a marketplace can continue to help, share, educate and entertain along the way, we think that next year is going to bring outstanding results to our world.

Elegant Marketplace has seen substantial growth in the past year and consistently provides a nice monthly income for over 100 vendors and has a customer list of just over 28,000 users – this to us demonstrates the need for a one-stop shop for plugins, themes and layouts and of course Divi Cloud with over a thousand members since May 2017 is proving to be a great resource.

Hosting

We have over the past two years, upgraded our hosting three times, we are now with Flywheel and we have to say, they are excellent, not cheap but, in this world of hosting, you get what you pay for. Our stats say we are getting over 5,000 hits a day – that’s uniques, so our site is definitely busy. Divi United is also hosted by Flywheel and without their help, Divi Cloud just would not work. So, a shout out to our hosts is well deserved.

Movers & Shakers

We have had the pleasure of seeing the likes of Melissa Love, Michelle Nunan, Munir Kamal and many others succeed & grow in the area’s of learning, membership sites and stand out designs of child themes and layouts. Vendors like James King (KK DIVI MODS) Ivan Chi (Enterprise and plugins) Sean Barton – probably the most prolific Plugin Developer for Divi out there and many many others on our vendor list without whom our business would not be the success it is today – for the sake of brevity,  I converse with all the vendors and am always grateful for all they do for us and the community .

Thank you!

Finally, our small team of Andrew and Mahesh our very hardworking support, developer, and CSS guru and Evgeniya our stoic VA along with the rest of the Divi Cloud Team of Sean Barton would like to wish all our customers, Vendors, Elegant Themes, Elementor and all our interviewees a very Merry Christmas and a particularly successful 2018.

As always, our motto is ‘Give a little, get a lot’ – feel free to comment below.

Andrew Palmer

Andrew is the founder of Elegant Marketplace.