The Best and Worst Feature of Avada 7.10

Avada 7.10 introduced several new and long-sought-after features, including new animation capabilities, OpenSreet maps, and a few other things. In my opinion, the best feature that was added has the worst implementation — background hover color.

The good

The hover color option adds a feature that has been requested for many years. The simultaneous rollout for containers, columns, and images solves many design issues that previously could only be solved with custom CSS and hopefully paves the way for other functionality.

The bad

While this is one of my favorite new features, two aspects make this not so great — the user interface and the lack of global styling.

The user interface

This addition changes the user interface for all instances of hover colors. For those that existed prior to the release, the hover color was a separate value setting, usually directly below the default color. The new user interface merged these into a single location that is not clearly identified, and until you get familiar with the icon and function, it can be frustrating. As you can see in the following images, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, the circle icon would go unnoticed.

Most other builders use the mouse pointer icon to indicate state controls, and the circle choice is a bit odd to me. I am hopeful that additional states (pseudo-classes) will be added for items where active, focus, and visited are important.

Lack of global styles

This capability also raises the issue again of the inability to create a global style using the editor. While you can create one design and save it to the library, any changes made to the library item will not affect anything other than the library item, and every implementation has to be changed independently. Other builders have already solved this with the ability to create global styles. I recently worked on a site with about 30 columns that all use the same style, realizing that any time I want to make an update, I have to edit each individually. Not only does this take too much time, but it is also prone to mistakes.

The version 7 updates have been a huge improvement to Avada and continue to make it an ideal choice for simple sites and beginners. Still, it has also identified the shortcomings of using it on larger sites or for those of us who want to do more advanced design work with less effort.