I’ve been pondering about this for quite a while. I have developed sites for clients with ACF, Enfold, Webflow, and CraftCMS. Have been looking at Elementor and Bricks, my issue with those systems is that it’s fine for me, but doesn’t get out of the way (enough) for clients.
I decided to dump my latest Webflow site (which looks similar to Bricks) and move everything to CraftCMS because the maintenance was above the skill level of the client. It’s all right when you just want to edit a page, but gets complicated if you want to make for instance a post with a Youtube embed, responsive images with srcset so it is SEO optimized, and a CTA block. Then you need to understand the Bricks/Elementor system I think?
I now have a client that is using ACF (built by another agency), which would be my preference, but there are so many options in that setup, that the client is confused about what to do when. It’s not wysiwyg enough for them to understand what they are doing. So they want something else that is flexible as well, but easier to follow.
So what would be the most simple way to enable making flexible posts and pages for clients that have a Word level of understanding post editing (and some level of WYSIWYG)?
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I think Elementor is going to be hard for pages, except editing text, remove and add images and such trivial tasks.
For posts, I think the easiest solution would be using WordPress’s standard Gutenberg. There you can just add the block you need and that’s it. Responsive image? Drag and drop. Embed YouTube? Drag and drop. CTA button? Same thing.
But yea, it’s trash for pages and such.. If the customer has “Word-level capabilities”.. well, editing pages will be a problem with Elementor. I mean, yea they could get away with simple editing, but for instance editing the layout without creating a spaghetti? Not gonna happen. To be proficient with Elementor one must know at least a little bit of HTML, DOM and CSS imho.
Remember that this is just my opinion!
I’m going to go against the grain here and say Elementor & ACF mixed. You can still restrict the overall layout of the pages a little but also give them the opportunity to add more and edit things if needed down the line.
After building the site out, charge the client for a few video tutorials that are at most 5 minutes long, walking the client through the basics of their website build and how to make basic changes with Elementor.
What’s nice about it is most of the time the client decides it’s not worth their time to learn how to do everything themselves so they’ll always come back to you to get changes done. And at that point you can offer an hourly rate to make any changes / additions for them.