WordPress

WordPress is a powerful web publishing platform. With it, you can take control of your business website and social media. It’s affordable, widely supported, extendible and very easy to use.

How does it work?

Editing this page in WordPress 3.3

WordPress is a content management system. It is software that is installed on your web server which powers the site that your visitors see. You can login to the administration area to update and manage the content at any time. You can create and edit pages, news articles, image galleries, links, blog posts … or whatever you need for your content. WordPress is open-source and free to use, which means you can use it for your business, sports team, organisation, personal blog, online portfolio, product information, contact form – anything.

WordPress themes

WordPress uses a common concept called “themes” or “templates” – these are pre-built website designs comprising the layout, style, colours, look-and-feel and functionality of a website. Whilst we can and do develop 100% custom WordPress themes, often we start with an existing theme or framework and modify it as necessary. This saves an enormous amount of time and can enable you to launch a complete and great looking website is a very short time.

“Hold on, templates are bad … aren’t they?”

For a long time templates got a really bad name in the web design world – and rightly so – often they looked awful, didn’t work well across all the different web browsers and looked “cheesey”. Times have changed and now, with the evolution of WordPress, producing high-quality WordPress themes has become a lucrative business for talented web designers all over the world. Many of the latest breed of WordPress themes are bursting with customisation options and feature beautiful user interfaces from leading designers.

WordPress has also won the support of the web development community by caring about things like web standards, accessibility and open technology. Many WordPress websites have lead the way in innovation in web design in recent times. We carefully review themes that are available and only use the best, highest quality themes.

A theme is a starting point…

It’s important to understand that themes or templates are only intended as a starting point, and the particular style and content that is used to demonstrate them is just that – for demonstration purposes. They are intended to be modified for the end project. This can be as simple as changing the logo, a few colours and bringing in your content. Or, it might mean a total facelift- often the final website we produce is barely even recognisable as having come from the original theme or template.

We make no secret of what templates and themes we use, we focus on providing the customisation, hosting and development services. Any costs for themes and other paid software is normally passed on to the client at cost. We monitor the release of high quality themes and review them. We maintain a short list of the best and most flexible and powerful themes for use in our projects.

Custom-built themes

Using a 3rd party theme just doesn’t work for some projects, for all sorts of reasons, and that’s just fine. Maybe you have a design already? Maybe you need something quite specific that must be custom-designed, or maybe you just don’t like any of the available Premium Themes? We can build you a completely original WordPress theme from your existing design. Using a WordPress framework allows us to build custom sites into WordPress themes very quickly.