WordPress Website Design

WordPress website design is a process of consultation and communication to build a powerful marketing and communication tool. WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, with 55% market share, and getting the most from this fantastic tool is both an art and a science. In other posts, we have covered the basics of WordPress design (Part 1 and Part 2), and our WordPress Design Portfolio shows a range of custom designed sites and sites built from Off-the-shelf templates.  In this post we describe our process in designing highly effective as well as visually striking WordPress websites.

Website Design Phase 1: Consultation

WordPress website design starts with a consultation, so that we can gain a clear understanding of the purpose for your website, your target market or audience, and the calls to action. We believe your new website should be dynamic and engaging, and the measure of that is the actual interactions with your audience.  That is why we are focused on calls to action – which may be completing a lead enquiry form, purchasing from your shop, or ringing you. These are the measurable actions, and allow you to monitor, adjust and continually improve your marketing. The experienced team at TheDMA will work through this consultation phase to ensure that we understand your business, from the point of view of both yourself and your customers.

Website visitors expect visually appeal designs, and much of this has to do with appropriate and engaging images and multimedia materials. During the consultation phase we will be looking at your stock of photos, video and recordings (podcasts etc), to find the best way to present your brand visually. Where required, we can also source new images, or we will take photos and shoot and edit video for you.

Website Design Phase 2: Wireframe and Mock-ups

WordPress website design requires that form follows function. Once we have your content, multi-media and images, and calls to action clear, we combine these into an effective design. We aim for visually striking, and engaging designs. We will consider issues such as prioritising content and keeping the important materials and calls to action “above the fold”. Where possible, minimising the number of choices and areas to click and explore will lead to greater engagement with your audience. These initial designs are done in wireframe format, laying out the content areas and calls to action for the home page and each internal page style.

When you approve the wireframes, we move on to designing the site in full colour. These designs are done in Photoshop, and presented as flat files for approval. When approved, we “chop” these up to build the HTML and link the design into WordPress as an theme.

Website Design Phase 3: Build and Population

From the approved designs, we move on to building the site in HTML, and building your design into a custom WordPress theme. Your custom designed theme will be build on top of the Thesis WordPress framework, providing for greater control, longevity and flexibility in your site. For some projects, we will also begin migrating content or populating the site with content you provided. Often we will do keyword research and populate the content into the site ensuring that the each page is optimised for search engines as well.

Website Design Phase 4: Polish and finish

After the theme is built, and some initial content is in the site, we begin comprehensive testing.  We look at the new site in a range of browsers on both the Mac OS and Windows OS platforms to ensure that the style sheet, fonts and layout are all consistent and working well. Only after we have finished this process will we turn the site over to you to for review. At this point, we usually budget for one round of small changes and alterations of the site, as sometimes seeing the site live in the web will lead to improvements or subtle changes to the design.

Measure and Monitor

At TheDMA, we believe strongly in having measurable outcomes for our digital marketing activities. During the site build, we install measuring tools such as Google Analytics, AdWords conversion code, or other measures for either us or you to monitor the on-going performance of your site. At the end of the project you will have a beautiful, unique bespoke site, that presents your brand in the best light and provides measurable marketing impact.