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WordPress has really taken the development world by storm in the last 5 or so years. It’s grown from a relatively small blogging platform to one of the most versatile and easy to access content management software in the world. Its capabilities, flexibility, customizability, and support have driven us to begin using it for most of our projects in the last year or two. It takes a few extra steps, but it’s well worth it. Here’s how the process would go if you decided to buy a WordPress website from us.
Step 1: You tell us what you need
First step of any good process is listening to what you, the client needs. We find out exactly what kind of content you want, what functionality you need, what timeframe you’re on, and what kind of websites/elements that you like.
Step 2: Val creates an awesome design
Val will then take all of that information and create some amazing mock ups of some pages on the website for you. Once you have a chance to look at the mockups, you’ll get back to us with some revisions and we’ll hone in even closer on the perfect site for you. This is your chance to really perfect the look and feel of the site that you’ll have for the next several years.
Step 3: Build the framework out of PHP/CSS
At this point, we just have a design in a Photoshop file. We’ll take that file and turn it into a working home page and content format page. These are pages with dummy content and are pure code – you wouldn’t be able to edit a thing at this point in the process. The reason we do this is that it separates any potential problems with WordPress from problems in our base code and ensures that the “foundation” of your website is solid as a rock.
Unfortunately, this can be the longest part of the process so don’t get too anxious!
Step 4: Put theme into WordPress
Since WordPress is so dynamically-oriented, we can take those two simple pages we’ve built and turn it into a whole site worth of pages, whether you have 10 or 100 pages. We do this by converting all of the code that we used to build your framework into WordPress hooks in PHP. So, your statically-coded title tag turns into a dynamic hook such as “get_the_title()” so that you have the power to change it on every single page individually. We do our best to make the site as dynamic and easy to edit as possible.
We’ll also go through every pixel of the website and ensure that it’s absolutely perfect and ready for the content. This is our testing stage to ensure that the base functionality of the site is in perfect working order.
Step 5: Add plugins, content, and a little bit of magic to make it all work
After we have the theme all built out and your base, frame pages inserted we’ll start adding your content. We add a custom selection of powerful plugins to add the greatest amount of functionality to your site. This includes SEO, caching, Google maps, sliders for the homepage, etc. All of these plugins extend the site with the least amount of work from your end and have the ability to stay updated with the latest and greatest specs.
Step 6: Testing
This is your chance to go through and see everything on the site. You’ll be able to test out all of the ins and outs of your website and get a “sneak preview” before anyone else. We’ll change out content, go through a couple rounds of edits and at the end you’ll be ready to take the site live.
Step 7: Tada! You have a working site
This is the fun part! You finally get to show your website to all of your family, friends, and customers who have been hearing about the site for months. We’ll point your domain name over to us (if we’re hosting) and get all of the email and other features of the site set up.