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!
My name is Rolf Inge Holden, aka Finge among friends, and I run ConversionLab, a conversion rate optimization agency out of Trondheim, Norway. We help customers boost conversion rates on paid traffic by running and optimizing landing pages through A/B testing (also known as split testing). We also offer email marketing and retargeting. The driving force behind everything we do is to increase conversion rates (% of visitors performing your desired action).
Starting a business
After working for 13 years in Sales and Marketing at DHL (the last 2 as responsible for all online marketing), I decided it was time to start my own business. Out of all the marketing I was involved in at DHL, using external landing pages was the single most effective tool we used.
With that in mind, it was very clear to me that from day 1 my business had to be about external landing pages and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Building a website
Once I had made the start-up decision I needed to get an online presence – fast. I started off with just a single landing page to let my friends and network sign up for a newsletter to stay updated on things to come. The «coming soon» page evolved into a one page website, and stayed around for quite some time. I was fortunate enough to get business from the very beginning, so I had to focus on my customers first.
Moving to WordPress
I soon realized that I needed a website that was scalable and would let me easily publish and manage content. After testing some various platforms such as Light CMS and Squarespace, I decided to go for WordPress. I simply did not find that the other alternatives gave me enough flexibility.
I had a clear vision of how I wanted our website to be. And to be honest I might have been a little bit too obsessed with details. Know the feeling? I used a theme as a starting point, and was able to pretty quickly get it going in the direction we wanted. However, I needed to hire an external web designer to get all the details just right both for CSS and html coding. The project ended up costing us twice as much as we had originally intended.
Discovering Divi
I believe we had our WordPress website live for around 6 months when I came across some discussions online praising the Divi theme. It peaked my curiosity. Since much of the website was custom made it did not scale very well. The bells and whistles we had weren’t easy to use across the site, and we were pretty much stuck with the pages we had. This made me even more interested.
I first started playing with the Divi theme on a different domain in the beginning of May. It delivered everything I had hoped for, and I decided to make the move to Divi. Mid-May I literally moved our website over to Divi in a matter of 2 full days. I was able to create everything our previous site had in terms of functionality, and then some! Keep in mind I had to hire a WordPress expert to get the previous site just right.
With the release of Divi 2 we have been able to do even more cool stuff. The Divi page builder has given us a solid platform, that we even use to report our testing results to our customers as a page on our website, rather than the typical boring presentation or pdf. The CSS animations and various counters are perfect for displaying key performance indicators. Plus our customers love it!
For us, it’s all about conversion. Our website is centered around generating leads (as any site should be), and Divi makes that really simple. We might have a few more call to actions than usual, but hey … it works 🙂 Of course we also A/B-test to continuously make the website convert even better.
I’m currently using WordPress.
So I chose to use the plugin, one of which is the Plugin Smush it
thank for sharing , like it ..
divi is the one of the fastest theme i ever use….,, and easyly to configure, just drag and drop very simple and powerfull, my website is using divi , thanks eleganthemes for ctreaing this really nice themes 🙂
Hello! I just would like to give a huge thumbs up for the wonderful information you’ve here on this post. I might be coming back to your blog for alot more soon.
Where does one get that clever ‘elevator button’ vertical bar on the right – to choose your ‘pages’?
A common error – the word is ‘piqued’ not ‘peaked’.
Great stuff Finge. We will start using Divi in the future? Can you rate from 1-10? 🙂
Great case study!
Great job, Finge!! Loved your website.
I worked for DHL.UA in 2009, and I remeber working alongside with you for DHL.com Relaunch project)))
Good luck with your company!!
Hi Evhen – thanks for the kind words 🙂
Hi Finge! What a great site! I am new to elegant themes and absolutely love what you have accomplished with Divi.
I have been trying to find the comment on how you made it a one page site, but do not see the response in the relplies. Can you please repeat your answer? I have been watching the turtorials, but did not see anything about making it a one page site, so any help would be appreciated!
Also, what did you use to add the boost effect/improve your ROI/Quick Results area?
Thank you!
Thanks, Betsy!
Best documentation on how to build a one page site is here
http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/tutorial-one-page.html
The area you mention is created using 3 blurbs 🙂
My first website ever made http://www.JoinRenaissance.com
Thanks to Divi 🙂
First, nice site 🙂
What plugin do you use for the “One Page” navigation that makes the page scroll to right page section when you click on a link in the navigation?
Thanks for the kind words, Christer! Sorry for the late reply. I used a pluging for the scroll effect on the page, but this is now a part of Divi since 2.1. You have perhaps found and implemented already 🙂
Hi!
I love your website, very high end. This theme is awesome, yeah?
Only a small question. How did you made the newsletter button and pop-up?
I wish you the best 😉
Hi Vancer, and thank you for the kind words!
See comments above on how I created the pop-up. I made it using OptinMonster.com.
As for the signup button in the footer you can find more details here
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/integrations/custom-subscribe-button
Hope this helps!
Really appreciable. THUMBS UP FINGE
Thanks for the thumbs up, prakash 🙂
this is an interesting design, i am always looking at other’s websites as it’s bringing new ideas for our own businesses.
Thanks boss 🙂
Hi Finge,
thank you for your great tips!
could you tell me how did you placed a button in the header menu?!
thanks again!
bye
Fabio
Hi Fabio. The button in the header menu is hardcoded, but it’s also possible to add a class to a certain menu-item. This can perhaps help you out http://sevenspark.com/how-to/how-to-add-a-custom-class-to-a-wordpress-menu-item
Just wanted to reiterate that you certainly do have a clean and user friendly site and I want to thank you for taking the time to answer everyone’s questions. You have been very helpful.
Thank you for the nice words, Laurel! When people show interest and take time to craft a question, answering is the least I can do 🙂
Hi Finge,
Thanks for a great post. I saw it when posted I have just come back to see some of the answers to the first few questions that were asked – I now have my answers and a lot more!!
Thanks to Nick and Elegant Themes for Divi – I am in the process of updating my present site to the Divi 2 theme and find that these posts and others a great help, but also the video tutorials and instructions are very well presented for learning how it all fits together, and if I get stuck I can always open a ticket.
Thank you, Wilf. Hope you got some good ideas out of this 🙂
Very awesome site, easy to navigate and digest, a lot of modal effects and I love how toy sync the one that says “I want to help” button. How did you configure it to the PageSlider jquery plugin you used?
Hi bb! See my comments on both the one pager and modal to other questions here 🙂
Also, how did you configure your site to one pager? If I’m right, the tutorial wasn’t included in the Divi video so that I will stop looking for one-pager theme…jeez!
I have watched the tutorials and found them helpful. I have also started four or five separate tickets on the fullscreen issue only to be told that it can’t be replicated or is caused by plugins. Finally one of the techs admitted that it was a bug to be fixed with a future update. I wasted six weeks at least struggling with this. Honesty from the start would have gone a long way in keeping me a happy customer. Divi is a great theme with quite a few “flaws”. I hope you are putting resources to fix these bugs a soon as possible. Can you tell when the fullscreen problem will be fixed?
I am very frustrated with DIVI… it is very hard to use.
Have you watched all of our Video Tutorials and opened up a ticket in or Support Forum with any questions you have? I am sure we can help you.
Thanks for your article. How have you worked around not being able to exit fullscreen mode when editing in a text module? I have not been able to since the upgrade to Divi 2 and the ET developers and tech have no idea when this bug fix will be released. If you have found a way around this bug I would really appreciate you posting it here. Thanks.
Great article and site Finge! Good luck on your endeavors.
Thank you, David!
Love your site. Interesting and informative article. Updating my site now with Divi 2.0. How do you link the dropdown menus with sections lower on the page? Plugin or something new in 2.0?
Hi Bambi, thanks for the kind words. It’s fairly well documented in the plugins settings, but let’s see if I can give you a step by step to make it easier:
1. Install ‘Page Scroll to id’ plugin and see the instructions on how to.
2. Add CSS ID to the section you want to link to, like “information”.
3. Edit your meny and add a link named Information and URL as #information
4. In screen options, enable “Link relationship”
5. In link relationship – add “m_PageScroll2id”.
6. That should do it.
You might need to play with “Offset” in the plugin settings to get the scroll to stop just at the right spot.
Good luck!
Thanks for the help and the insight, Finge.
Not sure if this has been asked already…is the menu function (scrolling down the page) custom code or is this part of the theme itself?
Awesome site.
Hi John, to get the scrolling effect I use the ‘Page Scroll to id’ plugin. Fairly easy to set up.
Hi there,
Very nice article which is swaying me towards purchasing Divi 🙂
Just another “how did you do that” question — could you possibly indicate what plugin you used to power the freebies modal at the bottom? I like that it’s responsive too.
Thanks
Do you mean the ‘Sign up for newsletter’ button in the footer? It’s a custom coded version of the Campaign Monitor signup button, see here for details on their blog http://bit.ly/1nEod91
Merci pour ce retour d’expérience !
De rien!
Awesome, never heard about the Divi theme before. Your english language is quite good for a norwegian 😉
Haha, thanks 😉
yes!
Like it, thumbs up.
ie9 – “I WANT HELP NOW5 ” – close “X” not working at all 😉
That leaves just one option – asking or help 😉
Just awesome work Finge. Divi is give an amazing experience. Thanks to ET team 🙂
Hey Finge,
Truly shows what you can do with the Divi theme. More importantly though your copy is spot on.
Reading your blog and learning a great deal.
One quick question if you don’t mind. Love the contact form from the side! Is that custom code or plugin?
I really appreciate your feedback!
The form is created using a js and custom code. See previous reply on this page.
Sounds pretty interesting.
immediately see the demo 🙂
Nice website. It’s missing a favicon, though (the little icon that appears next to the website URL).
Thanks for the heads up! Should now be in place.
Wow…your site looks great! Congrats!
Thank you, Lana 🙂
Very nice site,i really love the contact form in the popup. Which plugin is it ?
We use Optinmonster. Very happy with it! It gives us a lot of signups – and we’ve seen a massive boom since this article was posted yesterday 🙂
Divi is an amazing theme, as you so adeply pointed out, Finge. So far, I have built 3 clients’ sites on it and switched my own site over, too. Each site looks radically different from the other.
I also love Divi because you can do anything you want to do with it! It’s like designing a custom theme without the need to do any coding, which takes a long while.
Divi is also easier for clients. I can label each section of the page so they can readily find what they want to change and edit in WYSIWYG. (I’m talking small changes that I really don’t have time to do.) They feel empowered, and it makes them happy, too.
Even making CSS edits in Divi Options is easy and really great. When Divi updates, your edits don’t go away so that you have go in and to do them all over again. (Without the need to install a separate plugin.) And now that the subscription form can integrate with MailChimp, Aweber, etc. Well… wow. Just really great and getting better. I can’t fit all the cool things it does into one post.
It’s just a really great responsive theme. In fact, I love it so much that I became a lifetime subscriber of Elegant Themes (was annual). I have to know, since Divi is so awesome, what you guys plan to do next! 🙂
WordPress is very buggy , need to update all plugin and core. One of my Blogs was hacked because of this. And then I found htmly. Database less blogging platform. Check this http://smartdetoxkonsultan.com
Agreed! It’s truly amazing! In fact, calling Divi a theme is a real understatement!
Nice post. I’m just getting started with Divi so it’s nice to see a good example of the theme in action.
A couple of juicy tips about how to create landing pages with Divi would have been nice, though.
Also, there’s a big typo in one of your section headers “Get high conversion rates for all screen sizes screen sizes”.
Actually there are several grammar / typo’s on the page.
Thanks for the heads up, Mike! I found 2 and fixed those.
Divi is an excellent way to easily create landing pages.
However I think there are far better ways to go about for landing pages if you want to get serious about landing pages. I recently commented on another blog post here on ET on the topic 😉
http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/create-landing-pages-using-wordpress
If you insist on using Divi for landing pages the best tip I can give is to remove the navigation. You’ll even find some general tips on increasing conversion rates on my website that will apply also for using Divi.
Divi has a problem when you want to intergrate third-party subscription service (not Aweber/Mailchimp).
Often it replaces javascripts with a kind of ‘safe’ text, preventing to run a script.
As I use neither of these two, but http://campaignmonitor.com for Email Marketing I have created a custom modal solution for that (button in footer).
Finge,
I want to use Campaign monitor as my AR but it only lists mailchimp or aweber.. Is there an easy work around for this?
Wow! Very impressive! Would you consider joining our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/494980220631579/ people sharing ideas and helping one another build better websites using Divi, it would be great to have you there.
Thank you, Eileen! I just joined now 🙂
Nice clean site Finge, love it! I am not an expert so I might be wrong but however I would suggest two small tweaks if you consider: firstly, I think it would be more appropiate that language selector is somewhere at the begining of page so that I don’t have to scroll all the way to the end to see it actually exists, although I don’t speak Norwegian 🙂 and secondly I would probably implement something like “back to top” http://codyhouse.co/gem/back-to-top/. I hope that helps, good luck with your business !
We are planning to add a back-to-top button to Divi soon 🙂
That’d be great!
Perfect!
cool 😀
Awesome!
woohoo 🙂
Appreciate the tips, Daniel! I will look into the back-to-top, have actually been looking for something like that! Thank you!
In terms of the language switcher I find that secondary – and I have chosen to include Norwegian more in SEO terms than anything else. However I need to make sure that the WPML plugin displays the right language based on browser language. Not sure it does right now…
Very clean & nice site, Finge. Go RBK !
Haha, thank you HakonZen. Not really an avid soccer fan myself 😉
Great post! I’m running the Divi theme now and for a new guy like me it’s been awesome to use. It doesn’t get any easier than hitting an insert button and adding text to design an entire page.
I have seen your website before and I remembered thinking it was really nice and clean. I also like how divi’s animations allow me to display results in such an effective and eye pleasing way. Best of luck to you!
Thanks for the kind words, Adam! I agree on the animations, they really help make numbers and results come alive.
I dig those buttons (boost conversion rates etc). Is that a plugin? If so which? It looks like the buttons from another theme I have seen and I really like that look.
Thanks Philip! The buttons in general are just styled using CSS in my child theme. The one top right in the menu bar is hardcoded in the header.php. Hope that helps.
Finge,
Thank you for sharing your story.
I am new to Elegant Themes and Divi. Can you share the CSS you used to “hardcode” the button that you have on your websites top right hand corner titled “Get In Touch”
Thanks
How did you fix the header like that – stays pinned to top of screen, does not shrink? I have been trying to achieve that for awhile now!
Scott, go into “Divi Options” in the Appearance section of WordPress. Then, disable “Fixed Navigation Bar.” That will allow your header to stay sized where you want it to be. Otherwise, it will shrink as you say.
This was the answer I was looking for, but unfortunately when I disable the “Fixed Navigation Bar” the Navigation Bar does not stay “fixed” which Is what I would like.
Does anybody know how this is done?
Thanks.
Just one question, what did you use to get that contact form to slide in from the right? I really love it!
Thanks Geno! The slide in contact form uses a js. I used this one http://srobbin.com/jquery-plugins/pageslide/
Hi Finge,
great page!
The link to “jquery plugin pageslide” is broken. Do you have the right link for us. I am really searching for this function! Please help.
Speaking of js, I love how easy Elegant Themes has made it to incorporate custom jQuery and JavaScript into the Divi theme. Sure beats the old WP method with enque!
The links to pageslide leads to a 404. This seems to be the same plugin: http://www.jqueryscript.net/zoom/jQuery-Plugin-For-Responsive-Page-Slide-Menu-PageSlide.html
Fantastic site and great plugin, really good find!
Good luck with your new business, your website certainly reflects a great level op professionalism!
Thank you! Really appreciate your comment!
Thanks for sharing the site and this plugin. Your site is does a great job of putting your product forward. The value points and calls to action are very nicely presented within the Divi framework.
Thank you, Sue 🙂 Also wanted to point out that I use Contact Form 7 for the form itself.
Nice job Finge. I love both the website and the business model. Best of luck on your future endeavors! Keep up the inspiring work!