Developing a website

The first step is to understand the purpose of the website (e.g., e-commerce, portfolio, blog) and its target audience and analyse competitor websites, market trends, and user preferences.

A list of technical requirements needs to be set (e.g., hosting, content management system) and desired features (e.g., responsive design, security) as well as an outline of the structure and hierarchy of pages and of how the content will be organised.

The next steps is to create a simple layout (wireframe) to visualise the basic layout and structure of key pages without getting into details like colours or fonts. This can be used to get more feedback from you about the vision you have for your website.

Once the basic wireframe design is agreed, a more detailed visual representation of the website, including colour schemes, typography, icons, buttons, and imagery will be developed.

I will ensure that the design adapts to different devices and screen sizes (mobile, tablet, desktop).

Often this stage can overlap with the previous design steps.

Developing a custom WordPress theme involves creating the structure, design, and functionality of a WordPress website from scratch. It requires knowledge of web development technologies like HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript along with a deep understanding of WordPress architecture.

I will often use a page builder to develop all the pages and may use some custom code to add more functionality. A page builder will make it easier for you to maintain your site when it is completed.

I may also install and configure various plug-ins to add features to your website. For example WooCommerce for a shop and MailPoet or FluentCRM if you require a mailing list system.

This is a very important step in the construction of the website. We need to make sure that everything works as intended before publishing it. 

I will obviously do a lot of testing myself, but it is good if you can get some of your colleagues or friends and family to view all the site’s features and report to you on their experience. This is the only way to find out about bugs or potential issues before the general public does.

At last your site is ready to be published. We will agree on a day and time when it can be made live so that more testing can be done immediately afterwards.

Yes, more testing is necessary as a change of hosting / server can introduce compatibility issues. It is rare, but it can happen.

WordPress is a system that requires regular updates to resolve bugs and apply security patches. This is a very important process to keep your website secure. The WordPress dashboard will show if updates are necessary and has a facility to automate the process. My recommendation is to do updates manually via the dashboard and to always do a full backup of your site beforehand, just in case.

If you do not wish to have to maintain your WordPress system yourself, I offer a maintenance package where I take care of all this for you. 

Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the code, structure and content of a website so that it can attract more relevant traffic from search engines and in greater quantities.

Your website will have been built using a clean code structure and given a layout that is optimised for getting a good search engine ranking. But its long term ranking can depend on many factors that can be introduced in the lifetime of a website.

Things like broken links, missing images and changes in the content structure can affect its long term ranking. For this reason, I offer a tool that will regularly audit the site and report on any aspects that may have a negative impact on its ranking.