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WordPress Websites


Flexibility, Functionality, Adaptability

WordPress Website Design & Development

Easy to Customize

WordPress revolutionized web design, since it was built around blogging (and updateable content), and it enabling interchangeable themes! Themes allow you to download and install different pre-configured designs or  “skin” for your website. While the theme may be shared by thousands of others, you can customize and configure it uniquely for your business, using your colours, your branding, and navigation (form follows function!). It takes a skilled web designer  to start with a theme and customize it properly. Then you can focus on website content and flow.

With a WordPress website modestly tech-savvy business owners can update their website content. RSS feeds helps you reach to more users, and chat integration helps you answer questions form your smartphone. You can upload files & photos directly to the website sing your hosting platform or a plugin.

Low tech-savvy to update the website

Great for content-intensive sites

We use WordPress to create content intensive sites. The content management system (CMS) is open source and they uses open source technologies like PHP, MySQL that reduces cost of management and hosting.The many “themes” (templates), and plugins (tools) are available at modest cost, to  provide a starting point for design, enable enhancements with quick features integration, and simplify site updates and maintenance. A WordPess website design may be the solution.

If you’ve ever tried to design your own website, you know how hard it can be! Trying to figure out layout, colours, and code can be so frustrating. It was hard enough in the early days when all monitors has 800 x 600 pixel resolution (the “Y2K” era), but now with all the  devices and browsers, responsive design requires you not to understand HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. Half the time, your site will end up just a big mess that you end up abandoning, writing off your invested time, and spending more money to fix it.

Low or no coding required

FAST IMPLEMENTATION


Develop quickly, evolve in iterations!

Be a fast-moving target

No matter how good your website is, your competitors will copy it and try to surpass it as soon as you launch. They will quickly reverse-engineer your keywords, your coding, and your SEO strategy. BE PREPARED TO IMPROVE.

Implementation typically includes:, content (the words), imagery (photos, diagrams, and logos), site structure and navigation, and any custom coding (including stylesheets, plugins, scripts, etcetera). Allow proper time (but not too much) for writing, review, proofreading, and approvals. Put the subject matter experts (the “SMEs”) in charge of their content (at least, the first draft of it).

Consider the concept of “Minimum Viable Product”, a concept used in “app” development.Your first version is a fully viable website, but with some reduced features or content.  Delay some lower priority features for the next release.

In developing content, consider what are your “Core pages” and largely static, which are “news” / articles, are created over time as your business grows and evolves, and thirdly your “product” pages. Your product pages can launch with the highest-demand items, and can grow to include more and more of your offerings, and incrementally add detail.

As well, once your new website is launched your clients will start giving you feedback, the good ones because they want  you to succeed. Never underestimate the interest of your clients!

Some of our WordPress websites

 

When WordPress isn’t Perfect

We have been programming websites for TWO DECADES, and are not married to just one set of tools and methods.

WordPress websites may be
too cumbersome and slow

Many sites have over a dozen CSS and JavaScript files, and are often too graphics heavy, so are really slow to load on many devices… For example, using JQuery for JavaScript library can add over 600 kilobytes of load time to a website. FoundLocally.com’s main website has a single 60 kb CSS file and about 30 kb of JavaScript to speed page load.

You may create “micro site” for a special event of product launch, and ongoing interaction with your customers is all done on Email or Social Media, so once finished, the site is hard-coded, and stays that way until it is no longer needed.

The Website does not
require regular updating
You cannot find a good
WordPress theme or template
as a starting point

Sometimes your branding and design concept is too complex for an off-the-shelf WordPress theme (it happens!), and needs to be custom coded.

When you need to integrate with  a company product database in Microsoft SQL or Oracle, or Microsoft Access, then hosting on a Linux environment is not an option, or the programming to integrate with WordPress is no longer an off-the-shelf possibility. Another strategy needs to be considered.

The website has
complex back-end
database integration
When the website is too large

The FoundLocally.com website, for example is over 100,000 pages of content. Can you imagine the Pages menu for that? WordPress websites work well for sites from 1 to 100 pages, and above that become rapidly unmanageable.

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