Technology
Divi 4.0 is a game changer!
In this episode of the Design Illus Show, Esme dives into the revolutionary features of Divi 4.0, a powerful theme builder for WordPress. Discover how this update transforms web design, making it easi...
Divi 4.0 is a game changer!
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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At American University, we don't just hope for change. We create it. We don't just dream of a better world.
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We make it a reality. With a graduate degree from AU, you'll access expert faculty and connections throughout DC
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to develop skills and experience to turn your passion into purpose. And that purpose can make all the difference in your career.
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Discover the difference a degree makes at American.edu slash grad school.
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Hello and welcome back to the Design Illus Show. I'm Esme and I'm super excited you were tuning into this episode because I'm talking all about Divi or Poino.
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Hello there. Welcome to the Design Illus Show. If you are brand new, this podcast is designed to make web design super easy so you can build beautiful websites without being a pro web designer.
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And one of the tools of the trade is Divi 4.0 and that is what I'm talking about here in this podcast episode.
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So if you are new to the Design Illus community and maybe you don't know that I am a huge fan of Divi. Now Divi 4.0 only came out on October 17th.
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So up until this time we have been talking about Divi 2.0 and Divi 3.0. But Divi 4.0 changes the game.
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Divi is built as a theme but it's not a theme in and of itself. Divi is a theme framework that gives you the ability to customize pages of your website make beautiful pages without having to know code.
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But unlike a lot of the other theme frameworks out there, Divi is robust enough that pro designers like me can write code and stick it in there and then a non designer can go in and make changes without breaking the website.
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And this is critically important because in the web design world one of the biggest issues that we struggle with as professionals is handing over the keys to the kingdom to the client and then the client breaks the website.
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And that's a really big struggle and with Divi that's not so much of an issue. And so I am very pleased that Divi makes this so so freaking simple for us.
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But up until this point there have been limitations with what we can customize in Divi without writing 200 300 lines of code.
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So we can customize pages and we can have the header and the navigation and customize the font site wide. But basically that's been it until now.
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Divi 4.0 changes the game. Divi 4.0 is no longer a theme framework. It is no longer a page builder. It is a complete theme builder for WordPress.
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And with Divi 4.0 you have complete control over your entire website by creating global templates and designs that can be applied to categories to stand alone pages. You name it.
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The Divi theme builder has an option for a global footer, a global header that you can customize. You don't have to have the normal Divi looking headers and footers.
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You can customize them, make them completely unique to you and your business. And you can also assign them to different pages. So you could have the global ones that show up everywhere.
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Or if you, let's say, are selling products in a WooCommerce shop, you can have a different footer only on the product pages.
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The options are endless. The only thing that you're limited by in Divi 4.0 is your imagination. I know that's a cliche, but in this case it is actually true.
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One of my favorite things about this is the WooCommerce page design option. So WooCommerce is notoriously ugly and it's not exactly the best experience. And without spending many, many hours and many lines of code, it is very hard to customize what WooCommerce looks like.
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But with Divi 4.0, you can make a page template for all of your product pages that pulls dynamic content. So that means you design what you want it to basically look like and you say, well, this is where the featured image for the product will go.
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This is where the add to cart button will go. This is where the description will go. And then you save it and you apply this page design to all of your WooCommerce products.
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And seriously, in one click, every single product on your website is updated. Every single one. It is absolutely fucking amazing.
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So you can see some of that in action if you go over to asme.com slash shop because I'm using this for my geek swag for, you know, web design t-shirts and stuff.
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The first thing I did is I went and I customized the layout of WooCommerce using Divi 4.0 and it is amazing. It has really upped the level of the shop.
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And it took me maybe half an hour. In that half an hour, my shop suddenly has a lot more authority. It looks a lot more professional and legit.
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And I am all about making sure that you look as legit as fuck. So WooCommerce products pages, absolutely awesome.
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You can also assign page templates to certain categories. So let's say you write about a couple different things on your website. Let's say you write about yoga and you write about nutrition.
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You can have different page templates using the dynamic content as well only for the yoga pages. So you've got a sidebar of just the yoga stuff and you have different yoga poses. Maybe you've got a pose library.
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And then for the nutrition pages, you have things like a recipe search and you have a nutrition profile finder. And you can customize those pages with Indivi 4.0 and apply them to the categories. And in one click, it updates every single post in that category.
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It is absolutely amazing. It is extremely robust. It is extremely user friendly and extremely customizable. So I am all about this.
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So there are also a few things that you can do. Like you can target the post types. So you can do archives. You can do the categories.
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You can do pages. Each can have its own custom header footer body layout. You can import and export all of these things. The Divi Portability feature works for all of your page templates for all of the layouts that you are designing to be applied across your website.
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Those can be imported and exported. And that is exactly how I am building WordPress themes in Divi 4.0 that I can sell to clients to virtual assistants, anybody who needs it because of the Portability option.
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I love that about Divi. And an added bonus to this is it is not just about someone being able to import something that they bought. It is about being able to import and export design that you are working on for your clients.
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So as a web designer you need to be building your designs in a sandbox environment. So somewhere where you can play with it and if you break it it is no big deal you just nuke it and start over.
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Instead of building on someone's live website. However one of the biggest problems with that when the most time consuming frustrations is once you get everything beautiful on the demo site then you have to send it live.
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And that means you usually download everything and you upload it all to the client server via FTP. You change the database if you have to like all of these things that have made it very clunky to send a new design live.
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Divi makes that a non-issue. So you just export the designs using the Portability feature and you go to your clients website.
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And as long as they have already got Divi set up you import them using the Portability feature. This is a massive, massive time saver.
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So there is a few other things that you can be doing with Divi 4.0. So it is not just about creating category templates and custom headers and footers.
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You can create custom designs for basically anything. Your search results page, your tags page, your home page, your 404 page using conditional logic within the theme builder.
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Multiple areas of your website can be excluded or included. So you can have one little box that only shows up on six pages if you want.
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And you don't have to go to each page and add it every single time. It's very, very cool like that. I absolutely love it.
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One of the things that I did also as soon as I was checking this out is I built a custom 404 page for my website in about 10 minutes.
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Which is something that has notoriously been a problem on WordPress and on Divi. But no longer I now have a really kind of dorky 404 page.
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And people have been loving it. I shared it in my Instagram stories the other day and I received a ton of DMs of people laughing and saying how funny it is and how they want one too and all of these things.
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Because until now it has been really fucking hard to do. But now I could create a custom 404 page template.
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Put it up as a lead magnet on designer. Listen, people can just import it to their Divi websites if they've got the builder.
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So you can see that in action if you go over to asmay.com and for a page slug, just type in random characters. And it'll pull up broken 404 and you'll be able to see the design.
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So this is something that has been prevalent on, well maybe not prevalent is so much the right word. But it's been on my mind.
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Because when you're building custom websites for people when you are selling high end websites, you want to be able to give them a custom 404 page.
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You want to be able to customize every single part of the website.
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And until now that has been very difficult to do with WordPress and Divi. It's not impossible. It just takes way more time than it has needed to.
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And that is thankfully solved.
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So with all of that said, that's what you can expect in the Divi 4.0.
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So if you have seen ads for Divi 4.0 and you haven't downloaded it yet, you haven't upgraded. Go do it because you are definitely missing out.
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Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Design Realist show. I will back with more episodes next week.
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And as always, if you've got any questions, feel free to hit me up on social media. I'm at Asme Inc. everywhere and I cannot wait to connect with you.
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At American University, we don't just hope for change. We create it. We don't just dream of a better world. We make it a reality.
spk_0
With a graduate degree from AU, you'll access expert faculty and connections throughout DC to develop skills and experience to turn your passion into purpose.
spk_0
And that purpose can make all the difference in your career. Discover the difference a degree makes at American.edu slash grad school.