How Divi Transformed The Way We Work

I’m Sebastien. My brother Yann and I are co-founders of Thinkmojo, a creative video studio. We create fun, informative videos that help our clients explain their products in unique ways. But video production isn’t our only passion. We’re also avid web developers and designers and especially love WordPress. So about a year ago, when Divi from Elegant Themes was released, it was like ascending into developer-nerd heaven.

The Backstory

When we started Thinkmojo, we weren’t just a video studio. We also offered web development and design services, crafting unique, customized themes for our clients. That’s right. Our specialty was WordPress. We loved WordPress. Some would say we were in love with WordPress. We even joined forces with other passionate WP people to organize the first few WordCamps ever held in Edmonton.

Our love of WordPress inspired us to launch an “all-in-one” service called PressMojo. The idea was to help anyone get a WordPress site up and running in no time and for a super affordable price. Right away, ElegantThemes’ became some of our client’s most requested themes, which was fine by us, since they were our favorite to work with. The quality of the designs and code was so high that it made our job of “customizer” so much easier.

PressMojo didn’t last forever though. Right around that time, something else started happening – the explainer video business began to boom. So despite how well things were going, my brother and I decided to put PressMojo on the shelf in 2012 so we could focus all our time on video-making.

It was the right decision. Thinkmojo has been a fantastic adventure and we’re now one of the leading players in the industry. But deep down, we’re still developers. So about a year ago, when we decided it was time to revamp our website, we had a tough decision to make: do it ourselves, hire an agency, or find a premium theme and customize it for our needs. We wanted to the site to be as beautiful and functional as it possibly could (after all, this was our business), but we also didn’t have tons of time to spend on it, either. After all, we were busy.

Right around that time is when Elegant Themes released Divi. Knowing and loving ElegantThemes the way we did, we knew we had to give it a try. And once we did, it wouldn’t take long before we were completely sold.

Divi flexes its muscle

After a day playing with Divi, we were straight-up giddy about its capability and what it meant for our website. The ratio, quality, and flexibility versus the amount of work needed was fantastic. Using Divi, we’d be able to complete our dazzling new website in a matter of weeks instead of months, and for thousands less than we had planned. We only had to modify the theme a little to make it perfect for our needs, and that was it. All in all, the entire redesign project took 80% less time and money than we had originally budgeted for. And the final product was better than we could’ve expected.

But that wasn’t all. Divi didn’t just help us update our website. It also helped us transform the way we do business on a daily basis.

See, the “front shop” of the site isn’t only one side of Divi. What regular visitors don’t see is our private client section, where we create customized project pages for every client, allowing them to view all the progress we’ve made on their video, in one place.

This has been a huge value for us – not only helping us stay organized, but also helping us impress the heck out of our clients. (We’re not going to lie, these client pages look pretty sweet.) And the best part is, we really needed this.

Typically at Thinkmojo, we handle 10-15 projects at a time, with each one lasting from one to two months with around eight steps: concept, script, storyboard, art direction, video animation, sound design, revisions, delivery. Before we started using Divi, we’d have to email dozens of links to the client over the course of production, and things often got misplaced along the way. If we were in storyboard and the client wanted to see the script again, we had to dig it out of a mountain of emails. If we were at sound design and they wanted to see the brief, that was another adventure.

But with Divi, we only email one link, from the first day of the project to the very last.

It’s been great. And it was really simple to set up. Basically, we created a new custom post type (“Client Page”) and created a default page template for it. Our template contains eight Divi sections, one for each step of our projects. Now, we didn’t want our clients to see all of the sections right from the start of the project, only the ones for the steps which had been completed up to that point.

To do so we created a custom “.hide” css class that we apply to the section we don’t want the client to see. Basically just a “.hide {display:none;}” in our css. This trick couldn’t be simpler to implement, and it made a huge impact on our daily process. Now all we have to do is go to the custom post edit page and drag sub-sections from the hidden parent section to the visible one.

As simple as that. This new system makes the whole communication process super smooth, which saves us a ton of time and effort every single day. So when we say Divi helps us create value on a daily basis, we really mean it.

What’s next?

I’m sure the folks from ElegantThemes have some amazing new things in store and the developer nerds inside of us just can’t wait to see them. Speaking of which, even though we don’t do web development projects for others anymore, we still get a lot of requests and questions. People want our recommendation on the best services and themes, but in the last year, since Divi has been out, most of our conversations have ended up with us saying the same thing: “Go with Divi.”

If it brings half the value to you that it’s brought to us, watch out, you’ve got a lot of value coming your way.

This post is part of our Customer Spotlight series. If you have an interesting story to tell and would like to share your experience with WordPress and Elegant Themes on our blog, please contact us!