So it has been ages since we’ve written anything for our blog, so I feel it only right that I open up with a bit of transparency to what is going on with Divi Stride (Formerly Bolt Themes).
Rebrand:
Last year we changed our name out of the blue to most people but for me, I started to feel a disconnect with our name ( Bolt Themes ), when I started back in 2015 I like the name Bolt Themes because at the time I saw Divi and WordPress as tools in our website building toolbox and I saw my plugins as little Bolts which tightened our website (Making it standout).
But in 2017 with so many new 3rd party developers in Divi community, I felt a major disconnect with our brand and desperately wanted something that immediately let you know that we are a Divi.
So why Divi Stride? because Divi Represents the framework we build products for, that part a bit obvious but Stride? Stride for us represents what we want you to be able to achieve with our products, we want you to take strides at making your website unique to you. that is why we changed our name to Divi Stride.
Legacy Customers:
The transition to our new name was not a simple move with regards to all our legacy customers, so if you bought our plugins on either Bolt Themes or Divi Space then please email us your receipt emails so that we can verify your purchase and send you a coupon to get your plugins for free.
Pricing:
The last year plugin pricing has changed on most websites but we have stayed the same but we are at a point where we need to change our pricing structure a bit.
Most Divi sites have moved to a combination of site licenses and a yearly subscription, I’ve been trying site licensing on one of our products but I’m not a fan of that product pricing.
We going to increase our product prices at the end of the month by a few dollars for unlimited sites licenses with a yearly renewal model.
We need to add the yearly renewal so that we can continue to grow the products and to grow a team to help support our products and community better, by going the yearly renewal route allows us to improve our products, service and to stay true to offering affordable solutions for the Divi Community.
Support:
As we mentioned in the previous section we are wanting to improve our quality of support which at times has been terrible in the past, I’ve been getting better at responding to them in a timely manner.
The thing for has been that support can be such a drain on my creativity that I would end up leaving it and forgetting to respond, as I would rather be spending time on updates or new product development.
For the two months, I’ve been trying hard to get a quicker response time going but within the next few months, I would like to hire someone to finally take over this role for me.
Documentation:
Our documentation needs some updating as some of the material is still from the very first versions of our plugins which sometimes causes issues with our newer users, we have started creating documentation but this is also quite a process and will take some time to get perfect.
Community:
This has always been one of biggest goals and over the last year, we have been terrible at it, from helping in groups and creating resources for the Divi Community, last year the amount of time we spent doing these things was bad.
Hopefully next month I will have freed up some time to create new content and to get more involved in some of the Divi Community, especially the one which we’ve created.
Products:
Our products are honestly our number one priority, we have quite a few things we are wanting to release into the wild, we a bit annoyed because ironically the Divi Market has grown so much that in last week some of newer competitor beat us to releasing similar products but we’ve invested so much time in them that we going to finish them and release them anyways.
Divi Commerce:
We are working on adding more features to Divi Commerce but at the same time, we are having to change how certain things work because when we released Divi Commerce in 2015 everything worked differently.
Section Style Manager:
Section Style Manager was the very first plugin we created and over the last 5 months I’ve been trying to work out this plugins future and last month Elegant Themes added Section Dividers to Divi, so at that point we changed the price to free but yesterday we decided what we are going to do with Section Style Manager going forward, so we changed the price back to $11, sadly we need to finish other updates first but please know that this plugin does have a future which will include a higher price tag.
Tighten:
Tighten is still in an infancy period with just 5 modules and 1 function, we have quite a few more things planned for our next main update.
What next?
Last year was a great year for us but we want to see a massive growth this year, we also want to create additional Divi Brands this year, so we’ve got goals for this year which we are hoping to achieve.
I would just like to thank every single one of you who have continued to support us over the last 2 and a half years, without you I would not be able to live my dreams, I really do appreciate you and I really am sorry if I never responded to you in a timely manner in the past, I will be better this year.