WordPress Website Development

The project starts with a detailed understanding of the business requirements, gathering data and analysis, It sounds like common sense, but surprisingly, it's an area that is given far too little attention. Many projects start with the barest headline list of requirements, only to find later the customer's needs have not been adequately understood.

Once the business requirements are understood, a clear scope of works is produced. Our developers will identify what plugins and widgets will be required. Plugins and widgets may need to be sourced, customised or developed from scratch. This typically includes, but is not limited to:

• Membership Subscriptions
• Appointments & Calendars
• Contact and Order Forms
• Shopping Carts and ECommerce
• Social Integration
• Bulletin Boards & Forums
• Chat Support
• Media Gallery

We generally use commercial plugins which may be subject to recurring license fee's.

The web design phase of the project transforms visual concepts and ideas to prototypes. The prototypes specify the appearance and layout of all the pages, including specifications for the headers, footers, colours, fonts, images and media used throughout the site.

This activity is performed by a web designer and/or a graphic artist. If you opt to use your own web designer, it's important they use prototyping tools such as Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch. These tools provide the specifications our developers require, including:

1. Site specifications, screen width, margin and padding.
2. Prototype for each page, for each device, i.e. Mobile, Tablet and Desktop
3. Typography mapping.
4. Header and Footer, menu and widget Prototype for each responsive mode, i.e. mobile, tablet and desktop
5. All images to be of highest resolution, preferably in SVG format

This activity is a collaborative process which typically takes anywhere from 4 weeks to 4 months to produce.

Pre Designed Layouts

The design process can be fast-tracked by opting to use a pre-designed theme. Pre-designed themes are commonly used to reduce design time and costs by purchasing off-the-shelf designs. While they do give you some flexibility in changing the layouts, but the bulk of the layouts are rigid. If you wish to use a pre-designed theme, there is always a demo made available so you can verify and approve any themes that may be suitable for your site. Once approved and agreed by you, our developers will work with your chosen theme.

Copy is just as important as the design process. In order to connect with your target audience, attract new visitors, gain traffic and/or leads, you need to have well written and original content on your Website.

The benefit of having a professional copywriter is that with their experience, professional copywriters will research and develop a consistent and reliable brand for your site. They will work with the designer so that your pages are not image-heavy or light on copy.

Pre Supplied Content

If you have your own copywriter or have the skills to develop your own content, we can work with that. In such a case, all content needs to supplied subject to the following conditions:

1. Must be supplied in clear text (.txt) for each page.
2. All content headings and paragraphs to be mapped to typography.
3. All images need to be of the highest resolution, preferably in SVG format
4. All content to be final and ready for publishing.
5. All content must be supplied before the development work can start.

The development starts once the design and the content has been completed. We set up and configure a staging URL on a development server where we perform all our work. You can view the progress of the development on the staging URL.

Layouts

If you are using a custom design, the initial work starts with building your theme header, footer, widget area, menus, colours and fonts. Then we work on the layouts for all your pages. This activity takes time as we work though each page testing responsiveness on Desktops, Mobiles and Tablets.

For pre-designed sites, this process is not as extensive.

Plugins and Features

We will install and/or develop the necessary plugins and widgets as required. This takes time as each plugin and widget must work with one another and, sometimes they don't all play nicely with each other. We go through some vigorous testing to make sure they work as expected.

For more complex sites, this activity extends to integrating with third party sites such as payment gateways, shipping gateways, mail subscriptions sites, social networking sites, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook Meta Pixel, and other third party API's.

Content

Finally, we populate your pages with the supplied content, editing and cropping images as required.

We migrate the development site to our production server and your new website is now live!. We install all the post-production plugins and make the final configuration changes so that your site is visible on the internet on your domain.

Our relationship does not end when we ‘go live’. There are many other factors to consider

Training

Your WordPress site is very powerful and if you struggle we are able to provide WordPress training for your staff as required.

Maintaining your site

Maintaining your site is critical to ensure your security and protect it from vulnerabilities and hackers. Just like any software, you need to perform regular tasks such as software updates, database optimisation, daily offsite backups etc. Please see our WordPress Maintenance services

Marketing

You’ve just launched your new website, so how can you make sure it’s easy for Google and other search engines to discover and drive traffic to their site?

Today’s consumers rely on search engines to help them find practically everything, so your target audience is likely searching for products or services like yours. You will benefit from having a highly effective SEO strategy for improving your site’s rankings in search engine results.