Bricks Website & Community Templates - Critique

1

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have”
Bricks developers should take a leaf out of Elementor’s marketing and branding.

Candidly speaking, everything about Bricks marketing and branding is piss poor.

Examples,

  1. Website Hero Section

Elementor’s Hero section showcases a cool and short video loop about the capabilities of the builder. It’s fun and mesmerising to watch.

The Bricks Hero section shows an average random image with a stolen slogan from Nike ‘Just Do It” – “Just Build It”
What a lack of imagination!

It shows the website is designed by developers, talented developers no doubt, but with little prowess to capture the imagination of the potential buyer through good graphics, design, and marketing savvy.

  1. Community Templates

What is the the terminology other builders use!
Starter Templates, Premium Templates, Design Library, Site-kits, etc.

The word ‘Community’ associated with anything brings down the premium feel of any product or service.
Hey, here is the community swimming pool, where ten people might have probably taken a piss, would you like to take a dip in the community swimming pool!
People desire a premium feel for all products and services they use.
The only place the word ‘community’ looks good is for feedback. The company takes community feedback, which is a good thing.

Design-wise, the quality of templates in the Elementor/Astra/Breakdance/… library is far superior and radiates a premium feel.
Bricks templates look cheap, poorly designed, and are uncategorised.

Elementor has entire site kits, that are very well designed, and also multiple options for wireframes.
A beginner/intermediate-level web creator might look at these well-designed templates, get inspired, play around with them, and get going.

Since the templates in the Elementor library are very well-designed, it puts pressure on add-on developers to up the ante and provide much superior designs at a premium price. Only then will customers pay a premium price to buy those templates.
Currently, the bar Bricks has set for its add-on developers to offer premium templates at a price is non-existent.

Coming from Elementor to Bricks was a revelation about the technical superiority of Bricks versus other builders.
Herein lies the irony.
Bricks is a far superior builder, technically speaking, however, if a good product is not marketed and branded well, it gets robbed of reaching its full potential.

Food for thought.

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2

I agree with many of the points you shared. But I think you’ll like what we’re working on :wink:

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4

I was looking at the redesign of the Bricks Website, and am sharing some observations.

The new website is much better than the old one, thus am not gonna praise the good bits, just highlighting some eyesores.

Headings across the website:

Headings seem to be broken in a lot of places, all across the website, both on desktop and mobile. It looks odd and is not visually pleasing.
It looks like overflow-wrap (word-wrap) is used for headings!
It’s a travesty. It’s not a rookie mistake, as even rookies know how to style things at an ID level. This is over-engineering at its worst.
A team full of engineers but not a single designer.

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Text Size

Text size on the roadmap, and the Idea Board feel too big and on the face, both on desktop and mobile. It’s not pleasant and visually pleasing. The earlier version was way cleaner.

Cards

Some card items do not align on many cards across the website.
How odd for a website builder to have card items that don’t align on their website!

Shape Divider between some sections

There is a curve only on one side! At first glance, one looks for the curve on the other side, and it’s not there. It looks odd. Triggers the OCD. Symmetry is an important design principle.
Usually, such curves are used on either side, and the sections cascade over each other and animations are used for the cascading effects.

Hero Video

An ugly blue colour for the demo background matched with an equally ugly orange colour for hover in a blog archive where blog posts don’t align and ‘read more’ buttons don’t align!

Hero heading!

“The visual site builder that grows with you.”
Grows with you! Like a pet dog!
Grows like with regular updates to the software! Any builder can say this. All builders grow and update regularly.
What’s so special about Bricks doing that too?
All builders are visual site builders. What’s so special about bricks being a visual site builder too?
Where is the differentiating punch line!

Bricks is no longer at V1.0, it’s nearing V2.0, it’s time to assert its technical dominance.

—- The Next Frontier of Visual Site Building Excellence in Wordpress,
Designed by Professionals for Professionals.

—- Elevate Your Craft with the Pinnacle of Visual Site Building in Wordpress,
Designed by Professionals for Professionals.

—- Redefine Excellence with Our Next-Generation WordPress Visual Site Builder.
Designed by Professionals for Professionals.

Something along those lines might differentiate it and highlight its uniqueness!
A good copywriter or ChatGPT might suggest some great and better hero headlines. Who knows!

Wanna compete with Elementor! Attract its customer base, who I reckon are majority design savvy, then Bricks must up its game in the design department too.

Yin and Yang - Lean code matched with clean designs. Both must get balanced.

Food for thought.

5

I left Elementor because Bricks doesn’t look like it. It is not so bulky, it gives out clean code, it has no aggressive advertising, it has few stupid users and most importantly it has responsive developers. What to expect now? Bricks will turn into Elementor, which you will have to abandon again and look for something else??

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6

It’s the cycle of life.
I read a comment on YouTube and I largely agree with it, and if I have to paraphrase here ‘Bricks is like the love child of Elementor and Oxygen. Bricks took the good bits from both and left out the bad bits’

Bricks is a Business after all.
In the business of pagebuilders, within the Wordpress ecosystem, Elementor is the most successful and profitable business.
15 Million Websites are built on Elementor compared to ~30,000 for Bricks.

Thus it is natural for all pagebuilders including Bricks to compete with Elementor/Divi/Beaver Builder/WPBakery/Oxygen and others and attract their user base, along with attracting new customers in the Wordpress ecosystem.

If Bricks would be successful in that endeavour then a better pagebuilder would have taken the crown, currently held by Elementor.

Eventually after 5-7-10 years, some other pagebuilder might come along and be a love child of Bricks and some FSE theme/Block builder and take the good bits from both and leave out the bad bits.

Thus after 5-7-10 years, Bricks would become legacy software, and users will then migrate to that new page builder, the shiny new toy in town with all the bells and whistles of lean code and clean designs.
The cycle of life will repeat itself.

However, in the meanwhile, if we see some opportunities for Bricks to better themselves, then we must share the feedback, and it is up to them to consider the merits of such feedback.

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Good. My feedback and wishes are as follows. Please, Bricks, don’t become like Elementor. Do not build a business model of a large company. I like the current approach to development and support.

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It’s interesting to observe how people think about things.
There is a like on your comment so I’ll elaborate.

Let us analyse a hypothetical case.
Let’s assume you earn anywhere between 100,000$ - 250,000$ / year, either as a freelancer or as a small agency owner.
You service 25 clients to earn the above annual income.

If given a chance to service 250 clients, and increase your income to 1 Million to 2.5 Million Dollars/year, would you,

  1. Continue to service 25 clients thinking you can only provide quality service to 25 clients, and give up on the opportunity to earn a Million or two, or
  2. Take that opportunity to increase your income and service 250 clients, and provide quality service to all 250 clients by hiring a talented team.

Bricks is no different. It’s a business.
If say for instance, Bricks is averaging a Million $/year, why should it not target to earn 5 Million Dollars/year or 50 Million Dollars/year?

More Revenue = More budget for Development
More Revenue = More budget for catering to service requests
More Revenue = More budget for marketing and advertising
More Revenue = More Profits for the investors

Thus, if you wouldn’t give up on a chance to earn a Million Dollars a year, why should Bricks give up on a chance to earn 50-75 Million Dollars/Year, which is what Elementor is averaging if I am not mistaken.

Bricks is a far superior builder compared to Elementor/Divi/Beaver Builder/WPBakery and the like.
I enjoy using Bricks, and I suspect so do others who are already in the Bricks community.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the whole page builder community in the WordPress ecosystem would use Bricks too? That’s wishful thinking, but let’s say hypothetically they do.
If they do, Bricks would climb to the top, and the quality of the websites coming out of the WordPress ecosystem would improve by an order of magnitude.
But for these things to happen Bricks has to create a holistic ecosystem within it and around it.
A great-looking website that attracts and converts potential customers, a premium design library that caters to existing customers, a good support system, and continued development of the features within the builder.

But other pagebuilders are doing it too and Bricks has to compete with market forces.
Bricks has some of the ingredients to succeed while it is lacking in others. Bricks must fill those gaps.

“Bricks must not become big like Elementor with 400 Employees!”
Then what must Bricks be like? Oxygen! A 2-3 man team!
Oxygen is on its way to the graveyard, and Elementor crossed the 15 Million Website mark. Elementor is now also a hosting provider.
Elementor is a proper service provider with 75 Million Dollars in annual revenue.

“Bricks must stay at its current employee count and only make 1-2 Million Dollars/per year, and not make 5 Million Dollars/per year or 50 Million Dollars/per year!”
Where does this kind of thinking come from?
Its naivete. It’s a total lack of understanding of how any business operates.
Every page builder, including Bricks, wants to be in a place Elementor is, financially, but they aren’t.
The least any page builder could do is aspire to match or better that milestone.
There is no stagnancy in Business. Either it’s an upward trajectory or a downward trajectory.

My critique is harsh and blunt, but that’s the whole point of a critique, being harsh and blunt.
The point of my website critique post was to ask a question,

Does the Bricks website look like the website of a company targeting 50-100 Million Dollars / Year annual revenue?

9

An FB post brought me here.

I am 2 months ex Elementor user. I am feeling more like an Elementor hostage after experiencing Bricks. Let me tell you right away that I am not newb. I used Elementor extensively in my company as a selling point. Almost 100 domains in my Elementor subscription uses…Elementor.

I am so longtime user and I still pay them for a plan that no longer exists on their website. I canceled it just a few days ago and an Elementor staff member suddenly wanted a video meeting with me. My guess is just to hear what was wrong and why I canceled it. That is my guess because the meeting never emerged I don’t intend to spend 1 second with Elementor anymore.

I also seen people throw rocks on Kevin Geary CEO of ACSS when he said Elementor is a scam. Well, he is right.

Let me tell you this: Elementor is a SCAM! When you compare it to Bricks it is a SCAM. When you compare it to all of the standardized set of development rules and how builder should be it is a SCAM. When you try to use some of their paid add-ons it is a SCAM.

So here goes my VERY shortened version of why I have this opinion.

Over the years Elementor instead of focusing on quality and fixing issues started focusing on gimmicks and features no one asked them to do or to deliver. I know this for a fact because I closely monitored a decade-long issue on the GitHub community.

There are still a lot of functional problems yet they seem to be focusing on selling like game add-ons.

Don’t buy their AI. Why? Simple: you ask it to generate some wireframes - and you end up with empty prompts or errors. Same for the code example. And that is fine. However, you need to know this. You pay them on an annual basis for 25 000 tokens but here is a catch. Since the introduction and to the point of the last time I checked with them (two months ago) - THERE IS NO way for a user to see how much of the tokens are spent or left?!?!?! I wanted to see are my tokens are being exhausted with errors. But of course. No nope.

Don’t buy their Image plugin: Why? Because their benchmarks are anecdotal. Moreover, Elementor is a guest on my or my client’s websites. I don’t want to endure pop-ups and their advertising on every corner of the editor. Same for my clients. But no, there’s no way for me to turn that annoying thing OFF. At least there wasn’t a way a few months ago.

Now they introduced 3rd party Elementor extension catalog. Ridiculous. Most of them have bugs. Let alone Elementor.

They also do hosting now, and apparently email service.

So imagine and think about it for a second. Can you be good at one thing and excel or do you think to convince me that you can do builder, AI, image optimization, email service, web hosting, and a shit ton of stuff - at a professional grade scale? Yes exactly.

Anyway above is just a chunk of my issues with them.

Long story short - instead of fixing issues and focusing on performance they wanted to be all in one product. And that’s it. End of game.

Good for amateurs. For professionals, it is a SCAM.

I am lucky though. I ended up looking at Bricks, purchasing LTD and never going back. I’ll convert my most beloved client websites to Bricks for FREE as a way to learn and to train myself to Bricks better but so far Bricks is a relief.

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Wow,

Where did Kevin say Elementor is a scam?

How long you have been on subscription with Elementor?

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I don’t recall anymore but I can recall people on Reddit discussing this heavily (and attacking him obviously) and the same thing I saw on Youtube in the comments section. I am not tracking or saving the videos anyway but it’s there somewhere.

For the how long I have been with Elementor I have an easy answer for you - too long. I migrated to Elementor back then from WPBakery. And it was a relief and a light at the end of a tunnel.

However, my first issue started when I as a company owner tried to do large-scale projects. Under large scale, I mean large scale. Then I hit the wall. And no it’s not me, it’s not web hosting. Like I said I am not newb. I have my own servers, I know the difference between Apache, LiteSpeed, and Nginx and all of their pros and cons. And I am not speaking here about page caching but server-side caching, object cache, and so on.

In fact, over the years I discovered numerous issues with Elementor’s performance. It is so big that (in case you didn’t know it) some companies that were or are selling their products with Elementor started doing their own Elementor forks in order to address stupid performance issues with elementor. Example: Voxel (https://getvoxel.io/) - amazing product for the price btw.

The team behind Voxel had their own Elementor fork to address DOM issues and performance with Elementor (they even offered their open-source solution and Elementor could add it) which is not available anymore. They stopped releasing it because during 2024 Elementor team attempted to solve this issue (which is documented on GitHub) by adding their own Cache system which of course is buggy or was buggy at the time when I have had enough of it few months ago (also well documented on GitHub)

One of the last straws with Elementor for me (which nicely accumulated with everything else) was when I realized this year that they introduced the TOP bar with icons and tools instead of their usual LEft bar. I thought this was a nice improvement until I realized all of my multilanguage website owners had stuck with it because it broke their workflow with multilanguage tools. Of course, mighty dudes and elementor never cared to add this into their documentation to begin with. You can see the outcome of this in a thread like this: Elementor top bar integration? | WordPress.org and you know the list just adds up.

Like I said: I recommend staying away. Look if you are a portfolio, agency, charity, or a store owner with up to a few hundred products or something seemingly low profile (under that I don’t mean a lot of data or serious data processing) - Elementor was bearable. But with their latest “I want to do all and everything and you need to pay me” roadmap - no thank you.

When I started testing Bricks I found it a relief. Somewhat similar to when I migrated from WPBakery to Elementor. The difference here is that to my eye it seems that every feature in Bricks is well thought out with the latest tech solutions added to the engine.

Like someone with a smart constructive brain sits behind Bricks and thinks in the way “ok people really need this feature but let us do it correctly” instead of just adding a bag of issues.

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