Why WordPress?
WordPress is an Open-Source Content Management System (CMS). Unlike proprietary CMS platforms that need a (sometimes expensive!) software licence fee, WordPress is free to use for any project, commercial or otherwise. It is maintained and supported by a global community of millions of talented and passionate developers, all of whom pool resources to regularly improve WordPress, quickly addressing security or compatibility issues while regularly adding new and useful features.
User-friendliness
WordPress is by far the most user-friendly CMS that we work with. Publishing new pages and posts is as simple as sending an email (in fact, you can even publish to a WordPress site via email if you like!). When you’ve published new pages, adding and rearranging them in the menus is a simple, intuitive drag & drop operation. Uploading images, documents, video and audio is, again, simply drag & drop. You don’t even need to resize or crop images – WordPress does it all for you automatically! Embedding video from YouTube or Vimeo couldn’t be simpler: all you need do is paste in the link and our sites will automatically render the video in a responsive container that will look perfect on a desktop PC, laptop or mobile phone.
Scalability
At the last count, the WordPress Plugin Repository listed over 1.5 million (yes, you read that right!) free, open-source downloads. These plugins and extensions can be used to modify, extend and customise WordPress from a simple, personal blog all the way to a fully integrated e-Commerce website, for a fraction of the cost of a custom-developed solution. As well as the free WordPress plugins, there’s a huge amount of premium, paid plugins out there that can provide a huge amount of extra functionality such as CRM / ERP integration, payment gateways, booking engine APIs and much more. Again, all for a fraction of the cost of a custom solution. We are experts at integrating 3rd party services so, whatever your needs, talk to us!
Security
WordPress is every bit as secure as any other content management system, if not much more so
Many people wrongly assume that WordPress is vulnerable to malware, viruses and hacks. At its core, WordPress is every bit as secure as any other content management system, if not much more so. Vulnerabilities that can result in hacks almost always get in through poorly coded or out-of-date themes or plugins. As we develop our own themes in house, we only build what you need, and we build it lean, just for you. In the same way PCs sometimes need security updates, so do all database-driven websites. The big difference with WordPress is that you don’t need to be a developer to carry them out. Updating the WordPress core is literally a 2-click operation. In fact, the latest release of WordPress keeps itself up to date! When it comes to plugins, we carefully select and use only those which satisfy our strict quality criteria before we deploy them. If they don’t stack up, we build our own! We also undertake a lot of additional hardening procedures to our sites before go-live to make them rock solid. For obvious reasons, we keep our actual methods close to our chest, but our sites are tough. Damn tough!
Why Bespoke?
Complex 3rd party themes and plugins often include lots of bulky code used to generate tools to build templates, layouts, widgets etc. without needing to learn how to code. That’s all fine and dandy, but just like waiting for your PC, the more software you load up, the more updates you need to make sure to run! Frequently, 3rd party themes include confusing paywalls that make updating a pain, so these sites often become out of date and therefore vulnerable!
…We build exactly what you need: lean, clean, stable and fast!
Again, just like waiting for your PC to load all those never-used taskbar icons, 3rd party sites need to load all that behind-the-scenes stuff before you customers seen what matters… your content! We really know how to code, so we build exactly what you need: lean, clean, stable and fast! All our sites are run through an exacting Quality Assurance process before launch and we always have backups both locally and on our staging environment. We use best-practice versioning (GIT) to manage and deploy updates. All of this means a great user experience for you and your customers and a great return on your investment.
Performance
Our websites are lean and fast. Where plugins are used, we test and evaluate rigorously before deploying. If they’re not up-to-scratch, we build our own bespoke functionality. We fully test the performance of our sites from locations around the world to make sure they perform.