How Divi Transformed The Way We Work

Last Updated on September 16, 2022 by 31 Comments

How Divi Transformed The Way We Work
Blog / Customer Spotlight / 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 β€œall-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 β€œcustomizer” 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.

Screenshot_Frontend_600

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 β€œfront 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 (β€œClient 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.

Screenshot_Backend_600

To do so we created a custom β€œ.hide” css class that we apply to the section we don’t want the client to see. Basically just a β€œ.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.

Backend_Animated_600

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: β€œGo 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 ourΒ Customer SpotlightΒ series. If you have an interesting story to tell and would like to share your experience with WordPress and Elegant Themes on our blog, pleaseΒ contact us!

Divi Cyber-monday Sale

It's The Divi Cyber Monday Sale! Save Big For A Limited Time πŸ‘‡

Save big on Divi and Divi products for a limited time.

Access The Sale
Divi Cyber-monday
Premade Layouts

Check Out These Related Posts

How Divi Is Fueling Entrepreneurship in Portugal

How Divi Is Fueling Entrepreneurship in Portugal

Updated on March 16, 2023 in Customer Spotlight

This post was submitted by Kevin Mullins as part of our community themed Divi Summer Sale week. Each day of the weeklong sale we will be publishing new stories submitted by community members about how Divi has helped them build their careers and businesses. β€œWork is a major instrument of God’s...

View Full Post
The twofentons Divi Journey

The twofentons Divi Journey

Updated on September 16, 2022 in Customer Spotlight

This post was submitted by Katie Fenton as part of our community themed Divi Summer Sale week. Each day of the weeklong sale we will be publishing new stories submitted by community members about how Divi has helped them build their careers and businesses. twofentons (the clue is in the name) is...

View Full Post

31 Comments

  1. Hi. This is such a clever idea. I’m not completely sure where to put the css however. Is it possible to get a few screenshots?

  2. Nice write-up! I made the switch from another theme and gave Divi a try! I have yet to look back and I’ve updated all my client’s websites using the Divi theme. All my clients have been very satisfied with the results! Looking forward to more customer spotlights and for more features to be unleashed by the Elegant Themes team (i.e. Divi Builder Plugin)!

  3. Great looking site but I am starting to see similarities in all of these websites created with Divi. By similarities I mean the same layouts, etc..

  4. Great post! Divi will change and has changed many developers and clients life. DIVI sections + display: none; has changed your way to communicate with your customers and that’s exactly why DIVI is so powerful. It’s flexible and giving endless possibilities.

    Thanks for sharing your experience, it matters a lot for Freelance designers to have such feedback.

  5. Awesome. It’s cool what you can achieve with a tiny bit of CSS. I did something similar by adding a “no padding” class to my websites so if things are too padded out I simply add the class and it thins everything out.

    It doesn’t take a hell of a lot to further customize it to get exactly what you after. I cannot wait for the update πŸ™‚

  6. .hide css technique is simply BRILLIANT! I already implemented this to my work flow. Thank you for sharing.

  7. hello Sebastien Lhomme ..
    by the way, what software create animation like on : http://thinkmojo.com/work
    very cool πŸ˜€
    can you tell me what software u used, hhe

  8. Hi Sebastian!

    This is a great testimonial, and I am considering buying Divi even though I don’t need it right now — it looks fantastic for a business/startup site, but I am working on a magazine website. Still, for these features and access to the other plugins, it may be worth the investment to keep on the shelf.

    I wanted to ask you if there’s anyone you recommend for the kind of work you used to do at PressMojo — aka customizing WordPress themes? I’m looking for a good recommendation.

  9. I loved your testimonial. I own a small web development company, and I love your approach to communicating with clients. I am going to give DIVI a try for my own website. I am going to recommend your video production services to my clients. Thanks for sharing your story! Whit

  10. Another great use of the Divi theme’s potential.

  11. Great idea!

    I assume you still have to email the client to let them know their project page has a new item on it for them to see? Be nice to figure out how to automate that too!

    We use Trello for this very thing but would be good to move it into the site but we would want a more automated system – so notifications fired off automatically.

    A project module would be a nice addition to DIVI for this very thing!!

  12. Hi Sebastien

    This is so inspiring, I’ve been looking for a way to handle client communication from within my own site for awhile now.

    Could you explain a little more about how you’ve set this up and the workflow involved?

    Why do you use a custom post type rather than just a page? How does the project page handle comments to and from the client?

    I’d really like to implement this myself but I’m struggling to work out the details so any pointers would be very much appreciated.

    Thanks

    Tanya

  13. Nice, Thx!!!

  14. What did you use to restrict access so customers can only see their page? HOW do you protect the page w/password? A plugin or what? Thanks!

  15. Fantastic work guys and highly inspiring! Your home slider not only loads fast but also gives a better explanation without ruffles, I love it. Thanks for this motivation.

    Cheers!

  16. What a great idea! I could use something like that for branding projects. I think it really helps clients see the value of your work when it’s all layed out in front of them.

  17. Great work guys. Very cool story.
    Love your mojo ET …Divi was definitely a new brilliant concept.
    Keep the evolution going πŸ˜‰

  18. Thanks for sharing Sebastien.

    Could you share the code for the hide CSS class? Thanks a lot!

    • here you go:

      .hide {display:none;}

  19. Love your use of a custom post, what a WOW experience for your clients! Thanks for sharing!

  20. Creating a hide class is something that I use regularly while messing with things in development. Hadn’t thought to use it on a live site in that manner though.

    ^_^d

  21. I’ve just begun a redesign of my site using divvi and I’m loving it too. I don’t have as unique a solution as yours for clients but my site is looking super. Now to work on more traffic and conversions…

  22. Sebastien,

    I also make explainer videos and I must say, your solution is quite ingenious despite its simplicity. The design of your site is very nice also.

    Thanks for sharing your story with us.

    Adam

  23. This “hidden.css” is a great idea… but how do you give the access of that page to client? With Password protected page? or client have to login as a user?

    Thank you in advance.

    • We generate unique, hidden URLs (for example: http://example.com/client/584dR1f02kle1771qw89aa8s56) and make sure it’s not indexed by any search engins.

      If the project if very sensitive, then we protect the page with the password that we give to the client.

      • Excellent website Sebastien!
        Sorry if I have a mistake. In the footer of your site says “Helping Their stories tell startups since 1782”. It is true that the “1782”.
        Warm greetings.

  24. Love your site, story, creative use of Divi. Brilliant!

    • Yea! I love their creative client management system being implemented.
      Thanks for sharing.
      Its great hearing so many awesome ways to interact with customers.

  25. What an awesome testimonial! Thank you very much for this Sebastien, great job!

    Can’t wait to the launch of Divi Builder so we can use it on custom post types like you did! Amazing workflow!
    Can you share some advise about setup it with the current version of Divi?

Leave A Reply

Comments are reviewed and must adhere to our comments policy.

πŸ‘‹ It's The Divi
Cyber Monday Sale!
Get The Deal
Before It's Gone!
Get Started With Divi