I’ve been using WordPress for about 2 weeks and spent about 120 hours on it, but I have no idea what I should learn to make progress. I’ve already watched a lot of guides and I know more or less how WordPress works, but my websites don’t look very good. So my question is, if I know most of the functions in Elementor (because I create websites in it), what should I learn next to make my websites look good?
Making a site look good is a completely different thing to building a Wordpress site.
Learn graphic design topics like layout, information hierarchy, typography, colours etc. These have nothing to do with web development and Wordpress. But you use the knowledge to design a good looking site (probably in a vector editing software or something like Figma), and only then you figure out how to build that design in WP.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like tech-wise, i got a good grasp on it all. Well, not all, i know there’s always more to learn and i am far from pretending i know it all already.
But i just can’t get the artistic side down. Whatever i try, looks cheap. Guess I will just have to start focussing on copying other sites’ designs.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. The hard part with this story is the sales pitch to the customer’s account manager. They are usually usually inexperienced in the practicalities of a good web site and want web features over content and that oh-wow moment within 15 seconds. They want colour and “pop” and rotating front page carousels and poorly thought through design concepts of form over function.
Anyway, it’s good to go in with your eyes open. Ideally you want a skilled function/information designer and a graphic designer, but I never found a project with budget for both.
I frequently find good solutions with the many great templates and themes out there. A good low-cost solution is to find a template that meets your functional needs, which you can customise with your customers graphic preferences. A skilled wordpress dev will always spot the template of theme, but it will look good, be cost effective, relatively well designed and cover the many screen size and functional options they will encounter.