WordPress Website Design & Development
You may think ‘blogs’ when you think about a WordPress site, but the days of WordPress being merely the domain of bloggers are long gone. Nowadays WordPress websites make up more than a third of the web – including some of the world’s biggest brands, including The New Yorker, Disney, PlayStation, Sony Music, Variety and BBC America.
At Superb Digital, we love building websites on WordPress, not only because they give us so much control over design and functionality, but because they are highly optimisable for search engines. The ability of WordPress sites to be structured in such a way as to create scalable optimised digital businesses, is unparalleled.
WordPress offers a selection of fantastic themes to choose from that look great on any device. If budget is an issue then this can be a great place to start, you can then select any additional modules you want.
However we also recommend going for a bespoke WordPress website whenever possible. This gives you a website 100% tailored to your needs and even greater flexibility.
What makes WordPress so Great?
There are lots of reasons to choose WordPress – not least is the fact it’s so customisable, yet intuitive and easy to use. Once we’ve built your site, adding and editing new posts and pages and yourself is pretty straightforward.
WordPress websites are built using modules that come straight ‘out of the box’, saving you time and money on bespoke functionality. There’s a wide range of easy-to-use modules for user management, comments sections, RSS feeds, sign-up forms, download areas, photo galleries, blog publishing, and so much more.
WordPress is an open source platform, which means there’s a huge number of themes and plugins out there. The variety of plugins is a huge selling point of WordPress and range from SEO plugins to security, content management and ecommerce. The WooCommerce plugin for example, allows WordPress to become a very powerful ecommerce platform that rivals custom built ecommerce platforms like Shopify.
WordPress also has an enormous community of active users and developers evolving and improving the platform all the time, with plenty of user support and dedicated forums run by WordPress developers there to answer your questions.
This also means that WordPress has a high-security standard, too. With so many developers using the platform, security threats are quickly identified and fixed – ensuring your website stays safe, secure, and well protected.
WordPress websites are also great for SEO. As an experienced SEO agency, we know that it’s one thing to build beautiful functional websites, it’s another getting them noticed in the search results. Working with WordPress makes things a lot easier because SEO is so integral to the site’s functionality, and not just an afterthought.
WordPress websites are great for SEO
At Superb we work closely with you to properly understand your requirements
Our WordPress Web Design Process
Whatever your web needs, here at Superb we’ll work closely with you to properly understand your requirements. Whether your business is selling online or providing a service, we have the experience in WordPress web development to get straight to the heart of what you do.
With a WordPress site you have two options – you can go with an ‘off-the-shelf’ theme or create a bespoke one. We’d always recommend designing and building your own bespoke WordPress theme, as this gives you far greater scope and flexibility when it comes to design and functionality and will serve you well for many years to come.
Our web design process is built to be as simple but as versatile as possible, suiting any client brief. Although some website projects are inevitably more complex than others, the basic website process follows the following steps:
You provide us with a website brief (this can be as simple as a mission statement of what you want or as detailed as a working wireframe with images and text).
- We create a technical specification that is then signed off by you
- We create the design, which is also then signed off by you
- We then build the website in an environment where it can be tested as if it were live
- You sign off on the final website.
- We conduct testing to make sure there are no bugs
- We launch the website
- We conduct a final round of bug fixes if required
Why choose Superb Digital?
At Superb Digital, we’ve been building beautiful looking WordPress sites since 2014. From simple brochure websites, through to more complicated ecommerce sites, we’ve built websites for all kinds of businesses and organisations. We have the experience and the SEO acumen to create a web solution in WordPress that will not only look and feel great to your users, but that you can effectively optimise in order to attract traffic and grow your digital operation for many years to come.
At Superb Digital, we’ve been building beautiful looking WordPress sites since 2014
WordPress Web Design FAQs
Why use WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source platform, which makes it incredibly versatile. It can be used for just about any kind of website, from a bare bones blog to a huge e-commerce site with many many thousands of products. There is so much freedom for customisation. You can go all out to personalise the look of your website and have a ton of features, or you can keep things as simple as you like.
The open-source nature of WordPress has also resulted in creating a large and supportive community. You won’t have trouble finding guides and other resources to help you take full advantage of WordPress’ feature suite. In fact, you’ll find expert web developers who have made in-depth tools and plugins to streamline and expand what you can do on WordPress. There are also hobbyist bloggers who relate their experiences using the platform in layman’s terms.
Even if you aren’t tech savvy, you can learn how to use and manage WordPress at a basic level pretty easily. If you just want a basic website, you can download WordPress for free as it’s open source. There are a dizzying choice of themes out there, but most are reasonably priced. There are also multiple tiers for access to premium features, all of which are priced reasonably.
You’ll also need to host it, which will incur a monthly cost.
What’s a plugin?
A plugin is software that you can “plug-in” to a self-hosted WordPress website to add new functionality or extend the capabilities of built-in features.
Plugins are developed by the WordPress community, as well as professional software and web developers. Because of how large the community is, as well as how long it’s been going, WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins. If you can think of a feature that you want for your WordPress website that isn’t part of WordPress’ feature set, it’s highly likely that there’s already a plugin that does just that.
The vast majority of WordPress plugins are free, but there are still thousands that you have to pay for. While plenty of free plugins provide value, you can’t expect all of them to be quality or have the exact features you’re looking for. Premium plugins are typically worth the upfront cost for their reliability, expanded features, and technical support lacking from free plugins.
Most plugins work seamlessly with WordPress when you install them, so you rarely have to do anything more to get them to function properly. However, with the sheer amount of plugins available, there is bound to be overlap between some of them regarding their functionalities and how they integrate with WordPress. This can lead to compatibility issues, which can be sorted out with the help of tech support, or avoided entirely if you carefully pick out which ones to use.
Who uses WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular platform for building websites. Recent statistics show that 38.5% of all websites on the internet are built on WordPress. Of all websites that use a content management system (CMS), 63.6% use WordPress.
Some of the most reputable media outlets use WordPress, including The New Yorker, Variety, and Wired. Big digital companies like Facebook, Etsy, and Skype have their blogs on WordPress. Even world famous celebrities like Beyonce, Justin Bieber, and The Rolling Stones use WordPress for their official websites.
And of course, there are the countless WordPress sites used by small business owners, mommy bloggers, food critics, indie artists, and other ordinary people who just want to have their own unique space online.
Is WordPress secure?
The short answer is yes, WordPress is secure.
The long answer is also yes, but there are certain things to keep in mind and a couple of precautions to take.
Because WordPress is the most popular platform for creating websites, it is also the biggest target for cybercriminals. A lot of people use the platform, and since it’s open-source, a lot of
people publicly talk about its features and how to modify its code, mostly for good reasons like creating helpful plugins. However, this also means more people are aware of its vulnerabilities and how to take advantage of them.
There have been a couple of widespread security breaches that affected over a million WordPress sites in recent years, and WordPress sites account for 90% of all CMS sites that get hacked.
It bears repeating, however, that the number of cyberattacks can be mostly attributed to the ubiquity of WordPress. The hackers go where the overwhelming majority of people and businesses are.
Security breaches rarely happen because of the core WordPress system, which is constantly being safeguarded by the WordPress Security Team. They are commonly caused by easily avoidable issues like outdated software and weak login credentials.
Why do I need to install updates?
Cybersecurity is like a neverending cat and mouse chase between software security teams and hackers—hackers find a vulnerability which security teams quickly race to patch over, but the changes that fix security issues and the addition of features can also introduce new vulnerabilities that hackers will exploit.
WordPress isn’t immune to such problems. They constantly publish updates to address security issues. If you don’t install these updates, you are only leaving your website exposed to cyberattacks.
The same goes for WordPress plugins and themes. Cybercriminals also use outdated tools as backdoors to WordPress websites. Plugin developers and theme creators release updates to account for hackers. This is why it’s important to download and install such updates as soon as possible.
Can I easily edit everything in WordPress?
The people behind WordPress know that a good chunk of the platform’s userbase is made up of people who have no experience in professional web development and design. If they required expert-level technical skill to build a website on the platform, WordPress wouldn’t be as popular as it is today.
So yes, it is very easy to edit in WordPress, even for beginners building their first website.
You can start with the Theme Customizer which lets you edit the basic elements of your homepage, from changing the image for your header to adding links to buttons. Writing, editing, and publishing written content is intuitive, which comes as no surprise as WordPress started out as a blog platform.
The latest iteration of the built-in WordPress editor called Gutenberg lets you build your website using blocks. You can focus on particular types of content such as text and images or mix and match different kinds of blocks. However you layout your blocks, the end result will look exactly like the preview. It’s also designed so your website will be formatted correctly no matter the screen size or device used to browse it for no extra effort. Similar to their basic editor, there’s no coding know-how necessary.
Is WordPress good for SEO?
Yes! In fact, we highly recommend WordPress for building your website because of how adaptable and SEO-friendly it is. From the ability to manipulate URL structure and permalinks in order to silo onsite content, to easy metadata management and image optimisation, there’s a reason WordPress is most SEO’s favourite CMS.
At Superb Digital we have built and optimised a lot of fabulous sites on WordPress. You can rely on us to apply our many years of SEO knowledge and web design to make your WordPress website both beautiful looking and as visible as possible for search engines.