 First up, can I say thank you for being here after a massive weekend of learning and meeting lots of people. Thanks for hanging around. It's always nice to know that there's more than a handful of people here, so thank you. Yeah, Elementor has absolutely changed my life. And as was said, I'm a marketing and sales automation specialist. It's where I get very excited working with people, and of course strategy is a big part of all of that as well. So I run two businesses. One of them is, does custom work, and the other is like a training business for people who like to DIY. So it's about helping people understand all of the elements of something and be taught using non-technical terms. So who am I not? I'm not a web developer. I'm not a web designer. I'm also not an Elementor expert, which is important for you to know. But rather I'm a very enthusiastic user. So in fact, I was after school one day with my son. I was at the park. There's another family's there. And I was talking to one of the mums, and she said to me, Mel, I'm having some issues. I need some content changed on my website. I'm finding it really difficult, and it's not going to be done in time for this event that I've got coming up. And so I'm thinking about changing to Wix or Squarespace, to which I said no. I know I've had some idea about her big picture dreams and what she was hoping for for her business. And I said, look, you're going to have some real limitations. It's going to hold you back later. So do me a favor. Go and try this product that I've been using. It's called Elementor. Have a little look around. There's lots of videos and content online and see what you think. And 48 hours later, she texted me and said, amazing, fantastic. This is game changing for me. And so while we're not about replacing web developers or web designers, it's about having that functionality and being able to change small things as we need to, right? Sort of minimum viable product. If we need to put a new image in or we need to put a new block of text or we want to put a pricing table in, that we can do that without breaking everything. And of course, backups are really important still. So what is Elementor? For those of you who aren't aware, and I'm sure most of you are, but I'll run through it anyway, is that it's a drag and drop page builder plug-in for WordPress. So if any of you have used, if you're a DIYer, you might have come across something like Canva, which is very user friendly. And it's one of these graphic design solutions where you can, it makes it easier, I guess, is that lots of drag and drop functionality. So I see Elementor like that in lots of ways. It's much more complex. But it's incredibly user friendly for the non-coders amongst us. Hands up for the non-coders are just out of interest. Yep, so I'm not alone. That's always good to know when you're talking about something like this. So for me, life is now somewhat broken into two parts. The year 2018 BE, before Elementor, and the year 2019 after Elementor. And so in 2019, I would go to my web designer and say, could you just do this? And for the web designers in the room, you're rolling your eyes already, groaning, I can hear. Can you just copy and paste that and move this from there and do all that? And of course, I would get, yes, sure, Mel. Yes, OK, but it's going to take us a few days. And so naturally, even though I did have an understanding of the need to do things properly, it was still problematic for me. So when my designer said, here, Mel, I'm putting Elementor on your site, go nuts, and we back it up regularly and things like that, it really was a game changer. So I'm really happy, and my web designer is equally as happy. So what I've done is I've done some short videos because I didn't trust myself to do anything live. And I'll just show you really quickly the couple of sites that I have designed using Elementor. So this is the first business loyalist, and as you can see there, it's got what's called, and now it's escaped me. It is an animated headline. So as you scroll down below the fold, you can see that we've added in some nice features there, scrolling features or motion effects as well. And then there's the second website that I've done, and while these are not the world's most beautiful, well-designed sites, they're still highly professional. Everything has been built using the Elementor elements. So for those of you who are wanting to know what is involved in Free Elementor Free and Pro, I'll start with Free. And so you can see here, these are some of the elements, and this is what you will drag and drop across into the display, which you'll see in a little bit as well. Things like images and buttons, all the obvious things that are there, spaces, Google Maps. In addition to that are all of these features, all of these graphic web design elements rather. So menu anchors, progress bars, formats for testimonials, so you don't have to design them up. It's already pre-templated. You can still adjust it. Really, really lovely. And of course, you can drag and drop a HTML block as well. So if you're looking to integrate something like your appointment calendar booking tool, you can literally pull that block in, copy and paste the embed code, and away you go. And so a little bit of a demonstration of the drag and drop functionality for you. So that's one of my websites. Here's the back end, clicking on Edit with Elementor. And as you can see, all the elements appear left of screen. So this is in desktop version. You can see what the desktop appears like. You can see here I'm duplicating a section. And so I'm just showing you how easy it is to once you've set up one section. I'm probably not using the correct terminology, but one section and one, you know, sets of columns. You're able to then duplicate and edit and go from there. So it's really easy. You can see there that you can change the words. You can change the colors. You can add columns. And then you can get tricky and start creating other features as well, such as scrolling effects or motion effects. So who hasn't used Elementor yet? How are you feeling about this? Is it feeling achievable? Yeah? Is it feeling like you're still getting a high quality outcome as a result of dragging and dropping? Yeah, so good stuff. Here I'm just playing around. As you can see, it's really a case of getting in and having a bit of a play around, of course. And so here I'm just playing around with one of the motion effects. The scrolling effect can increase and decrease the speed. And then, of course, the viewport, which is about how much, I guess, something can drop in or come from the side, those sorts of things. So clearly, this goes on a little bit too long. So I clearly enjoy playing around there. And so what you can do also beyond that, I'll just wait. You can see there, let's see the hover over here on the far left. You can see what says desktop, tablet, and mobile. And so you can actually elect to just click on that, get rid of mobile, get rid of tablet, and just say, look, that section's just for desktop, or that section is for desktop and tablet. And you can literally pick it from there, very straightforward. You can go to Style, change your colors really easily. And the hallway track we were talking about, once it's set up, it's a case of then, if you set it up properly, it's a case of all your brand style guide colors being there, your fonts and the sizes, default sizes are all there. So really, really friendly. And then there's something called Shape Dividers, which are a bit of fun, especially if you've got maybe a creative or artistic style business. You can do them for the top and the bottom of each section, play around with those as a whole range. And you can just see, this is not an edited video, it's that quick. You click on it, drop down, choose it, play around, see what works. Still playing, clearly still enjoying that. And then in just a minute, you can see down the bottom in that sort of gray section on the left there, you'll be able to see shortly, I'll click on the monitor. And that's where you can have a look and you can start editing for mobile or for tablet and adjusting. So once you've done, say, your desktop design to start with, if that's what you choose to do, then you can, what am I doing here? Adding columns, there we go, I'm replicating above. So you can see the lovely design of the above, it's literally a case of pulling in a text block, adding an extra column, dragging in an image, uploading from the media file, drag and drop a text block, very easy, nice to use. So how does this compare to your page builder? Who's liking this one better than what they've got currently? Just one. Yeah. Yeah, so it's worth having a look at and playing with, that's for sure. All right. Skip ahead, skip ahead shortly, here we go. Still enjoying the colors, there we go, lots of lovely colors. Here we go, responsive mode. So we can pull it into tablet, make sure that we're happy with the layout, readjust for tablet or readjust for mobile, which I'll show you a little bit more about later as well. All right, and so then, request access. Well, that's problematic, isn't it? Okay, so really what this is, because it's not appearing, that's okay. I'll pull this up really quickly and pause this because it was working this morning, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't be working right now. Bear with me one second. So if you can see the idea here is that at the top on the left-hand side, you can see that it breaks down into three key sections and actually it's showing layout there because that's actually a design, but let me move along a little. Even more pleased that I didn't do this live now. Still showing layout. Okay, unfortunate. So, but are those top three sections are the top three sections is basically content, then style and then advanced. And so, yes, you enter your content and it's very straightforward. I don't know why this is not working all of a sudden. Style, that's where you change your fonts and your colors and everything like that. And then advanced is where you can start doing things like bringing in scrolling effects, motion effects, and then you change for mobile or tablet. And so the pro elements for the paid element or plugin includes all of these elements or these design parts. So very cool things like portfolio slides and media carousels, login, which a lot of people are looking for but can't do animated headlines as you saw before, pricing table, navigation menu, call to action boxes, a countdown timer, which I'm gonna show you really shortly, reviews, share buttons, Facebook embed codes, and even forms. We all know that they're one of the hardest things to do and so this makes it very, very easy as well. Well, that's not good. Let's see. No. All right, so who knows what a countdown timer is? Yep, if you have campaigns where you're looking to open and close an intake, they're great and often people need to buy another or get another plugin and add it to the stack. And so as Tony was talking about yesterday, the less plugins the better. Really unfortunate that that's not working because it actually shows you how easy that is. It's another drag and drop countdown timer. You can adjust everything, change the background, change the color of the letters, and then of course go in and readjust for mobile and for tablet as well. This one is working. And so then of course there's the motion effects which is a feature of Pro as well. So similarly at the top here, you can see there's the animated headline and then here we've used the scrolling effects, the motion effect and you can set that up on the far left hand side to whatever speed you want. And again, it's a case of figuring out how much of how subtle or how significant you want that motion to be. And so you can just play around in there, choose vertical or horizontal scroll, adjust that speed and then there's the viewport there at the bottom that tells you just how much it's going to speed in whether it's gonna fly in from the side or if it's gonna be quite small. Very unfortunate that last video didn't work because it has a pricing table as well. So if you saw the pricing table on my site before, it's very, very smart. Well, it's just a very smart setup. This is another example of the motion effects. But the pricing table is great because it's literally a case of bringing it in, choosing the color, changing all the features or the benefits, changing the amount. It's all fields on the left hand side and then you can just adjust it and then duplicate if you've got, for example, a three tiered pricing structure and it's really smart. It's unfortunate that that is not deciding to work after working all the other times that it worked. So those are the two sites. And if you wanna have a look at the motion effects that Elementor can do, I strongly recommend you go and check out. Just search for Elementor, motion effects and there is a brilliant space scenario. Has anyone seen it? And as you go down the page, it's an outer space scene and the motion, everything's moving and it's just very elegant and beautiful and very, I would say the capabilities of these elements is actually very high level. So when you look at a very high level site that has all of these animations in play, this is giving you that capability in pro. So make sure you have a look at that. So I regularly talk about great ways to do things. So in non-techy terminology, so if you'd like to connect, those are my connections on Instagram and LinkedIn. Thank you, any questions? I would love to just flip back and just see if that one's gonna work. Why would you request access? Not gonna happen. Now, any questions? Hi, Mel, yep, I got one. I'm here. Oh, great, thanks. Right in front of you. So it seems like you really enjoyed playing around and exploring this. Yes. So I'm just wondering whether that was ever a problem whether you needed to keep this in this box. Like, did you end up doing this on your Friday nights, your Saturday nights as well? Was that a problem at all? Yeah, you know what it is, is that I love my work, but I don't get to do, I do creative things, but I don't get to do visually creative things, right, as much. And so yeah, it might have become a bit of an issue, but I guess it's like anything, the more you play around with it and get comfortable with it, the more it makes sense. And then you start seeing other things out in the world and going, oh, okay, I can see how I could apply that. And especially the motion effects, but it's okay, it's not a habit. I'm gonna be all right, but really enjoyable. Cool, thanks. Mel, reviews, does that pull in reviews from Google? Actually, Michael, that might be a question for you. No, Facebook reviews, yeah? Yeah, I'll use it. Yeah. Yeah, and there is a Google review one. There's a free one and a paid one. You talked to us about that countdown timer. Do you know whether or not Elementor can automatically change the content? So have the counter there until this date and then a different? Yes, yes, so you set the date and you can choose whether you've got days, you know, the four things, days, minutes, hour, seconds, whatever the options are. That's not right, but you know what I'm talking about. Yes, and then so once it's down that it's out, so then you can reset it and you can also hide it, of course, as well. Michael, is there anything else that? Yeah, Michael is the community, the Elementor Meetup Community Leader at the Gold Coast. So he is definitely the man to ask the more technical questions. Yeah, but it's great. It's a brilliant tool and we've used it with our clients who've got Elementor and they find it brilliant because they want to be able to have control over, you know, opening and closing that and not have to think too much about it. When they decide, yes, we're going to open again and they can do that without too much of us. With several of the functions in Elementor duplicating what's already in the theme, how did you decide on what functions you would allow the theme to manage, such as menus and things of that nature? Sorry, say that last bit again. So how did you decide on what functions you would allow the theme to manage, such as navigation and what functions you then set up under Elementor? So I didn't set this up myself, my understanding is that we haven't actually used a theme, so we've just brought in blocks and then decided what would be in each. There are themes that you can follow the format and you can do it that way, but ours was set up from scratch. So we decided what we wanted to be in each part. Right, so what theme were you using with your Elementor? So we didn't use a theme. There are a few themes you were talking about earlier today. There's Astra. What are the other couple of popular ones? Ocean, yeah. Hello. Yeah, so. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Well, if there's no more questions. Oh, wait, what's that one? All right. Yeah, thanks again. Great, thanks for having me.