Today I’m battling Elementor, the website builder overlay for WordPress. I need to fix my problem with headers. I have two different angles of attack to try. Elementor is still telling me that page so-and-so’s header is conflicting with a previously assigned header, HeaderXYZ, but that header has long since been deleted and extirpated. I mentioned this at the Elementor website and several people remarked about their similar problem.

But Elementor staff never entered the discussion until they posted “This discussion is closed.”

The other angle is that I have not defined a Page template. I’ve made a Post template.

     It’s another muddle of the basic WordPress division of the universe into Pages and Posts, which are very much alike but extremely different from each other, and with different rules that you are not told about. Just buy a plugin to fix whatever is bothering you!

I have a Page template on my Local version but I can’t seem to make it work. When I make a new page I try to assign it to the template, and sometimes it seems like I succeeded, but then when the resulting page displays, it has nothing to do with the template.

Part of it is that the page is not one unified thing, it is a patchwork of information from a database. You open a page to work on it and it looks like it has a header, but actually the header is summoned from a database. Each item on the page is actually somewhere else. This page did not exist until you went to the URL address and the computer assembled the page for you in a microsecond.

The page could be displayed on a phone or a laptop or a big monitor, so the computer will rearrange things according to what the aspect ratio of your screen is. The default these days is a single vertical column that will fit in a smartphone screen.

Kids growing up in this era have a new way of learning by interacting with artificial intelligence. This was in an article about the upcoming upheaval in the education industry. Kids will be growing up with a constant singular mentor who knows everything about the kid.

It’s going to be a much different environment than today. Today, the purpose of schools is to provide employment for administrators and teachers. The students are mere units to be processed, and drugged into compliance if they are restless or fidgety.

We are still unable to comprehend how much the digital age is changing our culture, knifing away aspect after aspect of how we do things. The education industry is a relic, a dead monument. Computers can do it better.

Maybe there’s a better option for me than WordPress/Elementor, but I don’t know how to find it. Every alternative is the best option, according to their marketing literature. Squarespace is the answer, according to Squarespace.

I googled for SquareSpace alternatives:

The Best Squarespace Alternatives of 2023:

Wix is best for affordability. Weebly is best for beginners. Shopify is best for e-commerce. WordPress is best for customization. Duda is best for agencies. WebFlow is best for no-code graphic design. GoDaddy is best for simplicity. Strikingly is best for speed to publish. BigCommerce is best for omnichannel sales. Google Workspace is more usable and easier to set up.

Oops, now I see that Weebly has been renamed Square Online. Kinsta, Webnode, Jimdo, Zyro, the more you search, the more competitors you find.

The problem of not being able to create Categories for Pages turned out to be soluble by using a plugin, “Pages with category and tag.” I created a category, “Workshop,” and assigned it to each of the submissions to the Workshop’s “Works In Progress” page.

I hope I can remember how to do it next time. At least I made a few notes this time.