WordPress Rules The Digital World.
We Simply Tame It.
Powering 25% of the Web. Inspiring us for over a decade.
8 REASONS TO USE US
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What is WordPress?
The world’s fastest growing web development platform, WordPress powers almost one quarter of the whole web, including sites like the BBC, TED, Samsung, TIMES, Spotify, Sony and IBM.
And this is by no coincidence—Companies websites with such high-traffic need power, reliability, flexibility and support, along with the many other features WordPress has to offer.
Ten Reasons to Use WordPress
- Open source
- User Friendly
- Low Cost
- SEO Friendly
- Fast Deployment
- Wide Development Community
- Extensions & Plugins Integration
- Secure & Reputable
- Powerful & Scalable
- Universally recognised
- Mobile-Friendly (okay that’s 11 but who’s counting)
Inside The Platform
The WordPress platform is split up into layers—each providing easy access and control over the website’s function and design.
The lower levels are where you will find the core functions, applications, theme operations, and internal customisations. The middle layers are home to the theme, plug-ins, short-codes, widgets, and any other components that have influence over how the front-end of your site will appear and behave.
The top layer is designed to allow easily control over the layout, content, media, and settings of a site, and is often referred to as the Content Management System (or CMS). The CMS is the shining jewel in the WordPress crown as it is built for real people, rather than coders and programmers.
As a specialist WordPress agency, we are experts in configuring the internal layers and building a strong foundation for your organisation to work with. Ready for you to adjust the content, media, and settings, as per your needs, guided by the helping hand of our WordPress Support team. Typically with the helping & guiding hand of a WordPress Support contract.
Did You Know?
WordPress started life as a modest blogging platform called b2/cafelog, which Matt Mullegweg and a Brit called Mike Little converted into a full-blown digital framework (history). Today, WordPress is trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands and powers an impressive portfolio of world-class digital services.
- One quarter of all new websites are built on the WordPress platform
- WordPress is infinitely extensible. It current has over 25,000 approved add-ins and apps
- WordPress currently holds 60% of the Content Management (CMS) Marketplace – It’s closest competitor is at a mere 9%.
- WordPress has one of the best security records of any digital platform.
- Cutting-edge responsive design and SEO come as standard.
- Unlike many other platforms, WordPress is Open Source. There are no license fees to pay, and you are the sole owner of your website, content, and data.
GET STARTED NOW
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1. Define Your Goals
To begin your digital journey it is first important to have a clear idea of what you need, and what you are looking for in a digital agency. Some of the questions you may want to ask yourself include:
Do we only need digital consulting or a fully polished turn-key solution?
Do we need a company which we can establish a long-term relationship with?
What other digital services does our company need? For example, Digital Strategy or Content Marketing.
2. Evaluate Your Options
WordPress may be Open Source and free to use, but you still need to find a hosting provider, web developer, graphic designer, and support agency, to see your project right through to completion.
If you are new to web development, we recommend testing the water and contacting a handful of different digital agencies to discuss their rate card.
The best way to do this is to create a short-list of agencies, and put together an outline of your requirements, an approximate budget, your project timescales, and your decision criteria. You can then share this information with your short-list and evaluate the results to help find your ideal digital partner.
What you pay for these services can vary a great deal from agency to agency, so we have put together a rough guide to help give you an idea of what to expect.
- Premier league WordPress agencies range from £800-£1,500 per day, averaging £150 per hour. This is where we sit.
- Second tier agencies can be a little cheaper, averaging at around £750 per day (£100 per hour) but often suffer from an absence of stability and history. They also tend to be weaker on support.
- Freelance web developers charge from £300 per day (£40ph). The quality and reliability varies enormously so expect to be an active project manager, and don’t expect continued support.
- At the bottom of the scale you will find off-shore companies, such as those in Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, who will work for £20 per hour. You’d need to be brave to hire from this end of the pool. Avoid.
Any questions? Contact us today and we will discuss your project requirements.
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Before we start we need to fully understand the context of the digital service and this means research, discussions, braindumps, surveys and market space analysis by a small team that includes management, project staff and pseudo-users.
The process should be carried out as a series of short sprints that should be completed in weeks, not months. The last sprint will see the creation of a series of user stories or use cases that cover the majority of the expected needs.
We encourage rough prototyping and even wireframing at the latter end of this stage but we expect it to be very rough at this stage.
This is also the stage where we can call it a day, maybe we underestimated the costs or complexity or overestimated the need to provide the service.
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The purpose of this stage is to produce a working version of the digital service that will be evaluated by the stakeholders to gain a greater understanding of design, user-flow and technology. And also flush out problems and challenges early so they can be addressed.
Depending on the demands of the live environment and technical constraints, it may be possible to simply convert alpha to beta/live.
If not, a clear understanding of what’s required to build the beta/live version should be clear and that might mean discarding the prototype to build the beta/live from scratch – as a result we are not precious with the digital service at this stage.
This is also the phase that we start to understand the expected ongoing support needs and the preferred method of fulfilling those needs.
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We’re ready to build the live service now as we’ve analysed the user needs, built a prototype, and shared it with the stakeholders. The objective is to build a final beta for real-world use – refining and improving as we go.
We will add and remove components – continually improving the digital service until it’s ready to go live-live. We’ll need to integrate with existing services and continually check back with the discovery phase to make sure we’re staying on track and losing the plot.
There will be technical challenges that will need solutions, specifically focussed on production-quality delivery. Beta and live are largely interchangeable, we may elect to test the new digital service versus the existing by traffic splitting and A/B testing.
Often, the service never really leaves the beta phase and moves into a cycle of continual improvement until such time as the user or technological needs change sufficiently to warrant restarting the process.
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This page: last updated Jun 2017, first published Oct 2010.
