Your business website has a lot of work to do. It needs to inform your readers, rank on Google and drive enquiries.
Maybe it needs to sell products online, or manage bookings and reservations. And sometimes it needs to do all of this in multiple languages. When you consider how much work your website needs to do, you’ll probably realise you need a developer with certain skills. In this blog post, we’ll explain why an agency with a background in WordPress development might just be your best choice.
What’s Involved in custom WordPress Development?
If you’re unfamiliar with how websites are built, it’s worth us giving you a quick rundown on what WordPress is and what it does before we jump into how it helps developers create more effective websites. If you’re already familiar with WordPress, you can skip to the next subheading.
But if you’re investing in your first website, or you’ve never heard of WordPress before, it’s best reading on.
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The Technical Part
Without getting too technical (and as a technical development agency, we’re prone to doing just that), WordPress is a platform that can be used to build and maintain websites, build applications, and even power enterprise systems at any scale.
It should be pretty clear that designers and developers aren’t constrained by WordPress. Far from it. This platform is so flexible, that with the right technical know-how you can use it to build bespoke, unique sites with eye-catching branding and a whole host of functions.
Instead of having to code everything from scratch, developers use the WordPress framework and any extra tools they need (called plugins) to create the main functional parts of the website. These are then customised to meet your business’ exact needs.
We’re not talking about downloading an off-the-shelf theme here. Make Do develop custom websites that are designed with your business’ exact requirements in mind. WordPress allows us to create fully bespoke websites, but we build around their framework and standards instead of needing to create a custom system.
So as you can see, WordPress development provides strong foundations for any website design and build project. But is it really the simplest way to a more effective website?
Flexibility is a Plugin Away
Ask any expert developer why they’ve chosen to specialise in using the WordPress platform, and they’ll tell you it’s because it makes their job simpler.
WordPress has been around for over 15 years now, and during that time it’s been updated, improved and optimised to make life easier for developers. The platform itself is flexible and solid, and there are libraries’ worth of documentation on how to put it to good use.
But one of the key reasons developing with WordPress makes life easier is the huge library of plugins that experts from all over the world have created, that provide a whole range of functions – from online booking, to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), to spam filtering.
Do things the ‘WordPress way’. Avoid third party libraries, or recreating functions that WordPress does anyway.
Matt Watson, Lead Engineer – Make Do
Having a list of tried and tested off-the-shelf plugins gives WordPress developers a head start when it comes to a bespoke website, but there’s more to the process than that.
We don’t just take an off-the-shelf theme, slap your logo on it and add a few common plugins. Instead we create unique custom plugins where needed.
All that flexibility is great for a developer. But what about for you, the business owner?
Adding Complexity
Well, WordPress development might be smoother, ensuring your new website will be up and running in a much shorter time frame, but it doesn’t mean less complexity.
A streamlined process lets us focus on bespoke, specific and sometimes extremely complex functionality for your site. All in service of ensuring that it’ll start paying for itself sooner rather than later.
And secondly, there’s a time implication. While customising WordPress and coding any required plugins is still a delicate and time-consuming task that needs technical expertise, it’s still a process that can be undertaken quickly using the WordPress framework as a starting point.
So What About Effectiveness?
Time and complexity aside, it seems like we’ve been acting as cheerleaders for WordPress because it makes our lives as developers easier. But that’s not the case.
If there was a platform that delivered better results for our clients, chances are we’d learn how to use that instead. But the fact is that there’s no such platform.
Let’s look at a real life example. A client we’ve helped with a network of websites. JCI.
WordPress is a Common Language – Saving JCI’s Network of Sites
Without digging too deep into that job (especially as there’s a full case study here), we needed to do a few key things for JCI.
- Create a network of sites (MultiSite) that they could update and manage themselves
- Tidy up after another web agency
Firstly, managing the site themselves. JCI is a non-profit that helps young people. They don’t have any coding and development experts, so if we’d built a site from scratch and said “you can update the code directly” they’d have had no chance!
Instead, building the site on the WordPress platform, we provided them with a simple-to-use content management system, which we could train them on in a day or two.
Complicating matters, we needed to do all of this after another agency had started.
While they also used WordPress, the original site builders didn’t have the experience to work on such a complex project, and they were relying on badly-made, off-the-shelf components to try and provide the functionality needed.
Benefits of a Common Platform
If they hadn’t used a common platform, it’d have taken us weeks to work out how to continue, spotting what could be salvaged and what needed to be jettisoned. But with WordPress as a common language, we could pick up where they left off and provide an effective bespoke site that does exactly what the client needs it to do.
An effective website with better accessibility and functionality, completed on time, on budget, and in a simple and painless way.
What better advert for the efficiency and simplicity of WordPress development?
Want to continue the conversation?
Contact our WordPress team today and see if we can help you take WordPress to the next level.
