LuAnn's specials board finally went online

LuAnn keeps the daily specials on a whiteboard by the register at her diner. Customers photograph it. Then they text the photo to somebody asking what it says. Her Facebook page announced the Thanksgiving hours of 2024 until last June. When I mentioned a website she said, "I don't need fancy. I need the specials where people can find them, and I need to change them without calling you."

That second part is the whole job. A page builder lets a person with no code edit a real website from a kitchen. I build most of my WordPress sites without one. For LuAnn's I paid for Elementor Pro, and I'll tell you what the $59 a year actually bought.

What it costs

There's a free version, and it's real. Drag-and-drop editing, a couple dozen widgets, decent templates. The paid plans sit on top. Essential is $4.92 a month billed yearly, $59 for one site. Advanced is $8.25 a month, $99 for three sites. Expert is $16.58 a month, $199 for 25, which is the agency tier.

First year runs discounted and renewals go back up to full price. Reddit threads complain about that jump and about slow support. One guy wrote that he opened six tickets for one problem. My single ticket, about a form that wouldn't email, took three days to answer. So I budget for full price on day one and I don't count on their help desk.

If you're one business with one site, buy Essential and nothing bigger. The tier above only matters if you're building for other people.

How the diner site went together

1. WordPress was already running on LuAnn's hosting, so I installed the free Elementor and built the skeleton: home page, menu, hours, parking note.
2. Bought Essential for $59 on my card for the pieces that matter: the theme builder, the form, and the popup.
3. Built the specials page as a template. LuAnn opens one text box, types the day's three specials, hits update. The header, footer, and styling stay locked. She can't wreck the wallpaper.
4. Made the lunch form email her directly, no app, no monthly fee.
5. Checked every page on a phone in the parking lot. Half her customers never see a desktop.
6. Sat with her for an hour and let her break it on purpose. Cheapest hour of the whole project.

Two evenings total. The bill is $59 a year for the license, and she squares up with me quarterly like everybody else. Her renewal will come due at full list, which I already penciled into next year's note.

The pallet jack version

Elementor is a pallet jack. A pallet jack lets one person move half a ton without a forklift license. You still have to know where you're rolling it, and you can take out a door frame if you're careless, but the fork truck isn't coming and the pallets aren't moving themselves.

Plain WordPress is building the same thing by hand, part by part. Powerful, slow, and easy to drop on your foot. The builder is the middle tool. What it costs you is weight: pages built with it run heavier than pages built clean, so complex ones load slower. Her homepage had nine fonts and a slideshow the first week. I cut it down myself and it stopped feeling like dial-up.

Two more honest complaints. Once a site is built in Elementor, leaving means rebuilding, because the layouts live in their format. And its built-in SEO controls are thin, so I run a separate plugin for that. Lock-in and weight. Know both before you click.

What sold me: LuAnn changed her specials from the kitchen on day two, without calling anybody. "So I just type it and hit update?" she asked. That's the product working as advertised.

What to do Monday

Install the free version of Elementor on a throwaway page of your WordPress site and build one section in it tonight. If dragging boxes around feels natural and you'd use it on more than one page, Essential at $59 a year is worth the money. If you only ever touch one page, learn the block editor instead. It's free and it's already installed.