 As someone who is very passionate about web design, I'm always keeping my eye out for dope websites. And any time I find one, I put it into a collection that I could use as inspiration for future projects. And bubble.io has been one of those websites in my collection. I really love this website. There's something just so clean about it, the way the white space is utilized, the new and modern typography, it's clean, it's minimal, it's a style that I really like. Now the only thing is, this is not the actual bubble.io site. This is. Now the difference between these two websites is that one of them is the actual real bubble.io site. And the other one is one I created on Bricks last night. What's up everyone, I'm Jeffrey at Lightbox. I'm an avid Elementor user. Last night, I wanted to geek out and run an experiment and test out Bricks. And what I did was I recreated the bubble.io homepage with Bricks. And I wanted to share this experience with you all to let you see what is it like for somebody who uses Elementor almost on a daily basis, trying out Bricks for the first time. I've had my eye on Bricks for a while now. I purchased it earlier last year. I saw it as something that had a whole lot of potential. And then I saw what Thomas was doing, the founder and creator of Bricks. I saw the direction he was taking it in and my confidence grew in it way back then. I saw that Bricks is something to keep an eye out for. This is something that's probably more than likely going to blossom into a solid platform. Now, last year when I got it, and it was still in the early stages like 1.2, 1.3 versions, I would go in and I would test it, I would play around with it, but I have to admit I didn't really have that much time to put into it because I do have a busy schedule running an agency and stuff like that. And it felt a bit confused too. When I went in and I tried it out in the earlier stages, it was, to me, it felt like it was going to be a really big learning curve. I try building some sections, testing it out. But then a few weeks ago, the 1.5 beta was released and it had a lot of dough features in it. So I went back in to test it out. And this is after not testing it out for a while. And I had a completely different experience this time. This time things went a bit differently where last year testing it out, it was a bit confusing. It felt like a big learning curve. This time jumping into the 1.5, even though it was a beta, it was enjoyable, it was pleasurable. I was finding it a whole lot easier to use. So last night, I geeked out. I stayed up late. I got the bags under the eyes, but it's all good because I had a lot of fun. And what I did was I ran this experiment. I wanted to build a high quality page, go through in detail, and see what that experience was like. The way that I approached this experiment was to use the same process that I use when I'm building Elementor websites. So I went step for step the same way I would as I would do for Elementor website. And that starts in the back end. So I started off with the settings. And what I did was I went through each one of the settings, try to understand it, see what needed to be set. And I liked it. I mean, my first reaction to this was it was pretty easy to understand. It wasn't over complicated. There was a few things I really had to take a look at. A couple of things that I saw would like to test. And some of them that I saw, I'm just gonna have to do a bit more research. The one thing I really did like about the settings was that it had a minimalistic feel to it. Like it still had a good amount of settings, very interesting stuff. But it wasn't overwhelming. It wasn't too much over complicated. It felt very minimal. And I liked that because I'm a bit of a minimalist. And I like to keep things minimal and clean. And I can see that's what the settings did. Then my next step was to do the usual WordPress stuff, you know, add pages, build a menu, set up my homepage settings. Next up, now this is where I ran into a bit of a hiccup right here. The next step I always do is to set up my globals. I wanna set up most importantly my global colors and my global fonts or typography. Because by setting up my typography styles and my colors, I'm able to keep everything consistent. And that is one thing I love about Elementor. I love the way that Elementor implements global styles and how easy and fast it is to use. Now, after a little bit of time, I had to learn and dig in and play around with it, but I was able to set up the global colors. And they work, the global colors are okay. I feel that it's a lot easier inside Elementor to choose your global colors, but they're still there and they still work. Now, the one part and the challenge I did have is the global typography, the global font styles. I could not find it. I mean, I did find a way to add global styles in a way as far as like setting up your H tags, your body texts. And there's a lot of different options for global styles, a lot, which is a great thing. Like for every single widget, there was options for globals. But the way I use my typography is a bit different. I don't like to use typography based on H tags or title tags or header tags. I use my typography styles based on the design. Sometimes my sub headers are very small. Sometimes my H3s are very big. And coming from Elementor where it's very easy to set up and basically just add a title, you click on the global, you choose your font style that you set up, that is so clean and fast and I'm very used to doing it that way. So that was where my bottleneck came in. And I found that building out the page, I had to set every single font style, which took a bit more time. Now, I know there's gotta be a way to do it. I know there's a workaround. I heard of automatic CSS, I wanna check that out. And I know there's still a lot to learn. So I might be missing it. I might actually be in there. I have to do my research. This is just the first time really getting to use it. I wasn't able to figure it out quite yet, but I definitely will be soon. Now, after I set up my globals, I always start off with my header and footer templates. For this experiment, I only did the header. I didn't do the footer. I got a bit lazy on that one, but I did the header. And that's where a lot of my time was spent at because it was my first time really getting in and using the builder in a real situation, a serious situation. Now I played around with the bricks builder before, but I never really used it in a situation where I was going in and making things very detailed. While I was replicating a design down to the pixel. And I probably could have gone a lot faster, but I was geeking out. I was just learning and having fun with it. Now, setting up the templates I found was really easy and straightforward. Took me a little bit of time to find things like display conditions and things like that. But the things that make Elementor so powerful, which are the display conditions inside with the page templates, like headers, footers, articles, things like that. It's also all there inside bricks. And then after I built the header, I went and built the rest of the page. Now this whole experiment took me about three hours. It did take some time. And well, a lot of my time was going in trying to figure stuff out. It was the initial setup, trying to set up the globals. That took a bit of time because I was going through the settings, not just the settings in the backend, but the settings in the builder. And that part right there, I see there's just so much in there. There's a lot to learn. I know I'm just scratching the surface. And as somebody who is like having fun with this, I wanted to dig in more, but I had to keep stopping myself like, now we just gotta build this page. Let's move forward. Now my experience, what was it like building out this high fidelity page with bricks? Well, my overall experience was, it was enjoyable. Like it was pleasing. It was fun to use. I really liked it. It was a huge difference between the first time I tried it out last year to right now with the 1.5 version. Now it did take me some time to figure things out, of course. And it's only natural. I'm learning a new tool. There are things like hovers. This might sound silly. I couldn't figure out hovers for a little while. I tried so hard to figure things out without Googling it or going to the docs and things like that. And I just didn't see any options for hovers. And when I built my header, I actually wrote some CSS to make the menus change on hover because I couldn't figure it out. It was only about halfway down the page when I decided, okay, let me Google it and try to see. It's a whole other option just for hovers on the top of the builder. And when I found that, I saw not only does it have hovers but it has other pseudo elements. It is so, as a front-end developer, it's exciting. You know, like those kind of things excite me. Like I got all these different options now for pseudo elements. So it's different options for what we have with elements or elements where it has options that are very useful that I use in the design side where I'm finding, I'm getting a lot more options for the development side on bricks. Now navigating through the widgets and their settings, that part took a little bit of time but it wasn't so bad. A lot of it was the same. I just had to get used to where to find it at. That was it. And by the time I was halfway through the page, I found that I was getting a lot faster at finding out where to get to my type and like change my font styles, where to go to my backgrounds, where I need to add gradients. Those kind of things that I normally use, the paddings, the margins and stuff like that. I got a lot faster with it. And I do believe that this is because of my experience with Elementor and using the page builders. One thing I see is understanding flex is gonna be very important for anybody starting to learn bricks. Gotta understand it, understand the flex settings, how it works and just be able to wrap your head around flex and the whole principles behind it. Now, if you're using Elementor containers right now and you really are good with the containers, the transition is gonna be really easy. And if you're a developer and you know CSS and you know how to do CSS flex box, well, that's gonna be easy. But I feel that if somebody is still using sections and columns, doesn't know CSS and really hasn't been utilizing flex, this is gonna be a learning curve. And this is why I've been torn with the whole Elementor containers. I feel that using the containers is great. It slims down the webpage, there's a lot more you could do, but it's not stable yet and that part hurts. And I know a lot of us are waiting for that. It was really fun using bricks and their flex and having everything just work. So if Elementor could do that, and I hope they can, I pray that the next Elementor release comes out with a stable containers. It is gonna be awesome because using flex on bricks was a great experience because everything just worked. I mean, I did run across some bugs here and there with other parts, but flex worked for me in all the situations I used on this experiment. Another part that was really different and I saw was gonna take some getting used to was using containers, blocks and divs. And again, the inner front end developer in me was just rejoicing on this. I loved it, it was awesome. But this does add a different dynamic to how we build the webpage because, before we have sections and columns with Elementor and then you go with containers and inner containers. Well, with this, we got more options. We got the containers, blocks and divs. And you gotta get an understanding of it. You gotta know your HTML, CSS and just get an understanding of in what situations should I use which one. Like, if I'm gonna build this section right here, what would be best for the section? Should I use a block or a div or a container? Now, I found when I built my page that I didn't use any containers at all. I didn't do it, I used flex throughout the entire thing. I tried to utilize flex as much as I can and I used blocks almost the entire time and in some situations I used the div element. It was fun to do and again, it was a lot of playing around and having fun and experimenting with it. But it does open up to a lot more flexibility when building out the page layout using flex. And with that, I could see why developers are gonna love this, you know, it's crazy fast and it is a bit more developer focused. But I also see that it could be useful for a non-developer as well because it does have that good UI. It has the options we need to build clean pages. And again, this is just me. This is just my first overall impressions and experience really using Bricks. Now, my goal for this video, it's not to try to get people to jump ship or convince anybody to switch from Elementor to Bricks, not at all. I only wanted to share my experience of what it's like. You know, at the end of the day, these are tools. That's what they are. They're tools for website creators, web designers, web developers, tools we use to build websites, whether we're building them for our clients or for building them for ourselves, for our own businesses. They're tools and what matters most is how we use those tools to get the best end results. And I believe that if you are creating websites for clients and you really wanna get good at it, there are other things we need to be focusing on when we are developing our skills because what's important is the end result. How good is that website? How is it maximizing your clients end result for their business on whatever the website is meant to do? I only wanna share my own personal experience because here's the thing, nothing is perfect. Everything has pros and cons. There's always areas to improve. I choose to stay focused on the solution. There's always a solution to everything. And that's what I always look at the solution and how to get the best end results. Now, you might be wondering, am I leaving Elementor, am I switching or jumping ship? The answer is nah, no way. Elementor has been part of my workflow, my company's workflow, my team's workflow. We got a stack, we got a process, a system that we refined. It took us years to get to this point to have something so refined where we're able to deliver awesome results for our clients. It's a tool and it's a tool that works very well for us. Now, what I am doing is I am adding bricks builder into our toolbox. That is gonna become one of the tools that we're going to be using along with Elementor. And we'll choose on the project where we use it. Now, I made this decision very carefully and very strategically. I'm very careful whenever I add something into my business's toolbox and to our stack. I wanna keep that stack minimal. I wanna keep a clean ecosystem. And I see bricks as something that's gonna add a whole lot of value to my business. So, we're gonna be using it. I'm excited about it, it's fun. I've had my eye on it for a long time. I was waiting for it to polish up. It got things I'm really excited for, things like the loop builder and there's other things in the works, the nested elements. There's just so much I wanna have fun with. And the last question, and this is, I feel probably the most important one inside this video. Should you be switching over to bricks from Elementor? And I wanna share with you the best advice I got when I was at the beginning of my journey, when I started off learning to become a web developer. I had a mentor that came into my life and gave me some advice that changed everything. It set me on a straight path. And the path that set me on is what allowed me to build a successful company. This would allow me to have the life that I have today and get to the level that I'm at. And that is master one thing at a time after you've mastered it, move on to the next. So, if you are using Elementor right now, you're in your early stages, master it. Get really good at it before moving and jumping around. Because if you don't master what you're working on, you're just gonna end up bouncing around, not getting good at anything. So, if you're asking yourself, should I be leaving Elementor for the new hot, shiny toy that just came out and everybody's talking about and going to, my answer is master what you're working on right now. Focus on what really matters. Be careful of the shiny eye syndrome because new things are always popping up. And if you are really good at Elementor right now and you want to take it to the next level, you wanna find something else, you wanna try a different tool, definitely Bricks is one to check out. I'm gonna be using both of them going forward. I'm gonna have tutorials for both of them going forward because they're both very solid tools. I like them both. I like the people behind both of them. So, that is my first impression. Let me know what you think. I know that was a lot right there. I stayed up late last night. I barely got any sleep. I didn't even wanna go to sleep, all right? I wanted to keep going and I had to like force myself to turn off the computer. Let me know what you think. If you have been trying out Bricks, let us know your experience inside the comments. And if you have any questions, drop them in the comments. Be happy to get back to everyone. I'll be back again soon. All right, thank you.