It’s amazing how ubiquitous WordPress has become. You see it everywhere, and you see so many web designers using it that sometimes it seems like WordPress has taken over the small business world, especially in this area. But what are local companies actually doing with WordPress, and how does a company like ours stay ahead of them?
Building Custom Website Designs
The first thing for us was to learn how to create custom websites instead of buying commercial themes and modifying them like most web design companies do. I wouldn’t want a website that had the same basic design as thousands of other websites, and I don’t think a client would either. As a non-web programmer, I learned a decade ago how to use Dreamweaver and Photoshop to create a design, then find a way to translate that design into a website. So instead of giving up and buying commercial themes, I applied the same strategy to my WordPress web development. I found commercial tools, learned how to use them, and kept at it until I could build custom WordPress sites.
Using Tools Effectively
Another thing is to use the knowledge we have to make WordPress sites compete effectively in the business world. The coolest web design in the world doesn’t do you much good if the site doesn’t have good search engine optimization. This is something I find lacking in a lot of small business WordPress sites. Even the page titles you see at the top of a browser window need to be altered in WordPress to be effectively found by search engines. Using things like contact forms effectively instead of just throwing a free plugin onto a site takes effort. Using image thumbnails to open into larger images takes some work, and keeping up with plugins that break when WordPress is updated takes perseverance. Even something as universal as the WordPress search widget needs some modification to show results in an effective way.
Keeping Up With Google
It amazes me how often I see a commercial WordPress site where the designer treats all of the pages in a site the same. Google’s Panda algorithm is best served by offering multiple “boxes” on the Home page, directing site visitors to the most important pages of the site (getting people off the Home page as quickly as possible, and into the interior pages). Design strategies like this are crucial to professional business web design. It is surprising how often businesses buy websites that don’t take advantage of simple search engine strategy.
Know Your Client
Rather than using the same strategy for every client, we try to gauge their skill level and their willingness to use available tools, rather than building cookie cutter sites. If a client isn’t likely to use Facebook or Twitter, adding those links to the website makes the client look uninterested in social media. Even though it’s now considered essential to use Facebook and Twitter we don’t make the client look bad by trying to force them to use them. Nothing is sadder than an empty Facebook page.
Client Instruction
One thing that’s great about WordPress is that it is relatively easy for a client to control their own content. But there are a lot of clients out there that still find this difficult. Developing tutorials and a training path that is easy is essential for a good web design company. You would be surprised to see how many people I’ve met who have WordPress business sites, but no idea how to edit them. We also add a complete video tutorial to every site we build, so a client can get training right on their own website’s backend.
Backups
There are now excellent solutions to backing up WordPress websites. Without a backup system a client can lose all of their site’s content. Rather than charging the client for manual backups, we include a backup system that backs up the database once a week, automatically. It’s not free, but it is essential.
To sum up, there are certainly many companies out there who do great work with WordPress, and who utilize the same tools that we do. But I would say that it’s a fairly small minority of web design companies. So before you buy a WordPress site for a price that seems great, make sure that you’re getting site with all of the essential tools to be an effective business website.