My Divi Theme History

Start of the Journey and my first Divi project

My journey with Divi started at the beginning of 2014. Beside my full time job as Director E-Commerce in the hotel industry, I founded my own online marketing and webdesign business already in 2012. But it took me about 2 years of research and comparison to find the ultimate theme for me – which is, as you know 🙂 The Divi Theme.

Then in 2014 I acquired my first client: A bike store called Radmarkt Schumacher (which means simply Bike Shop Schumacher). For his bike store I designed my very first website and it was a stunning experience for me!

The whole project was a lot easier then expected due to Divi´s brand new functions such as the Divi Page Builder. With the Divi Page Builder now I was able to create, organize, design and strcuture website how I wanted it – without any coding knowdlege. In these early days the Visual Builder was not there but the Divi Page Builder was already a milestone in WordPress webdesign functionality – compared to the standard editor of WordPress.

My addiction and the next (big) projects

I got addicted to Divi quite fast 🙂 and tried to learn everything about it. When I got more comfortable with all the different modules, functions and features, I thought about to implement Divi in all of our hotel websites. I still work as Director E-Commerce for a german hotel company and back in 2014 we thought about to cancel the contract with our external web agency partner and do it all internally with Divi and WordPress. This was quite a big change as from now on me and my team were responsible for everything.

But after a period of 3 months of A/B testing different designs, styles and layouts with Divi we decided to launch our very first Divi website for our company. This very first site was the company website https://eventhotels.com, which still is a Divi website.

After that we got more and more comfortable with Divi and decided to re-launch ALL of our hotel websites in 2014/2015 with Divi. At that time we managed about 20 different hotel websites, all from big brands like Park Inn by Radisson, Westin, Radisson Blu, etc. My part in this project was the design, the testing and the coordination of my team. We did everything now by ourselves.

Here is a short overview:

• Domainhandling and Maintenance
• Security, Backups and Updates
• On- and Offpage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Google Marketing Campaigns (SEM or Paid Search)
• Social Media Campaigns
• Newsletter Campaigns

All these important parts we now could do by ourselves – we learned a lot of new things and of course we did mistakes. But overall this time of change was awesome. And when we successfully launched the new Divi website for the second largest hotel in Germany, which is the Park Inn by Radisson Berlin Alexanderplatz (https://parkinn-berlin.de), we felt like kings! 🙂

From just webmarketing to full service department

Divi is great for all kind of websites. So also for the hotel business. We learned a lot of coding, css customizations and a bit more out of the box programming to implement fully customized solutions just for hotels such as, booking engine widget, trust you guest reputation widget, or pop up banners.

It delivered the very solid and cool basis for all this stuff and with it´s clone and layout library functionalty we were able to reproduce the most important parts of a website over and over again. So in other words, Divi is not just cool for designing websites but also for large businesses or large amount of websites which can be easy copied and reproduced over and over again. It therefore saves you a bunch of time.

Find out more interesting information, background stories and experiences in my next article Part 2, coming soon!

Divi is future save

As written above, with Divi you can start any business you want and with the cool Divi library you can scale your business a lot and save a lot of time. I also wrote about my first couple of years when I got to know Divi and learned how to use it for all business. I have created websites for Bike Shops, DJ´s, Recruiting Agency, Hotels of course 🙂 for Shops, etc. – So any kind of business. And it worked out very well.

When we took over all parts of website management and website development in 2014 with my department we also knew that we had to further develop our websites and ourselves. The Online Marketing and E-Commerce world is fast and therefore you need a system which is also fast and which develops itself also on a steady base. Divi did and still does it with many cool updates and improvements during the past 6 years. The Divi from today is like a “pimped up” car.

When it comes to updates, news, new functions of Divi, I definitely recommend the Blog from ElegantThemes, the company which created Divi. You can find the Blog here →.

The Blog helped us a lot to 

1. get notified about important updates in the web-world overall
2. get notified about the newest updates of Divi (all with great tutorials)
3. make the right decisions about plugins, child-themes or even hosting companies
4. stay up to date in actually all topics of webdesign, webdevelopment and webmarketing

Check it out and let me know in the comments what you think. There are great articles inside which gives you a lot of information not just about Divi, but all different topics of WordPress, Online Marketing, Webdesign or Social Media Marketing.

So we found our design / theme and from 2014 onwards we continiously implemented new features and are still amazed of what´s all possible with just one single theme.

More and more websites went live

Since 2014 I launched 100+ website for our company and also a lot of websites for my own business. Many businesses of course want a return when they build a website. And to produce revenue / sales with a website, the organic search position on Google is very important. To be visible or not means to be alive or not. Here the steady optimized framework code helps a lot. Divi from a natural perspective is slim, fast and therefore already optimized on a technical way for search engines – even we know that there of course are a lot important other factors to get a high organic listing on Google. Ok, Content is king, but speed reaaaaalllyy matters in these days 🙂 Especially as we know that share of mobile users is just hitting the sky, websites have to be fast, intuitive and user friendly.

Conclusion : My top reasons why you should use Divi

• Page Builder: Divi uses the so called Page Builder which enables you to build your website without any coding knowledge. You can design, style and manage the whole website easily
• Visual Builder: As an artist when you paint an image you do it on the “frontend” – Divi works the same. Directly work on the frontend and see what you do. Without switching back and forth between backend and frontend. Check out here directly → how it works on the Demo Page Builder page.
• Layouts Libray: With the steady growing Divi Library you have immediately access to hundreds of cool designed layouts for all kind of business. Just implement a layout, change the parameters you want like color, font style or anything else and: done! Go to Divi Layout Library now →
• Support: This is VERY important. Believe me. You don´t want to buy a good theme, finding out when you need help nobody answers your questions. In the past 6 years we have had a lot of questions, especially when we implemented 3rd party plugins, tools, etc. and the support is just great!
• The Blog: ElegantThemes has a great blog with nearly one article a day about Divi, insights, new features, cool new design showcases, WordPress information, updates and a lot more. It´s also a great source for marketing as it provides best practices for Shops (especially Woocoomerce), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Check it out here →
• Great Community: Around Divi in the last years there has been growing a great community with lots of easy to use tutorials, interesting adaptions, great 3d party plugins which include even more functions to the Divi Page Builder.
• Development: I can really say that the guys from ElegantThemes are not sleeping but instead of developing the Divi theme further and further. I can´t count all the great updates, new added features and functions in the past 6 years. With Divi you are definitely prepared for the future.

If you want to dive deeper into all features, please check out my other post for all details here →