Archives for August 2011

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.

WordPress is not just for Blogs! While WordPress started life in May 2003 as an open source blogging platform it quickly outgrew it’s blogging origins to become the most popular Content Management System (or CMS) on the web. At last count, WordPress powered 15% of the world’s largest 1,000,000 websites (and 55% of sites using a CMS use WordPress).

Why is WordPress so popular as a Content Management System (CMS)?

We can answer that for ourselves, and explain why we are so fanatical about WordPress for websites.

1. Easy to Use !

You need a website that you can manage, change and up-date the content, and add new relevant content for your audience (customers, prospects, community, interest group). WordPress is the easiest to use, as the experience of 100’s of our customers will attest. Adding content, photos, videos, PDF’s and documents, changing enquiry forms … it’s all a snap in the easy to use interface of the WordPress admin. It is also easy to use at a deeper level, with control over your search engine optimisation, managing comments on your posts, controlling spam, and analysing your results. All of it adds up to a website that is easy for anyone with moderate computer skills to manage.

2. Extend Functions and Features with Plugins

Recent stats show WordPress has been downloaded 32 million times!  The open source nature of WordPress means that there is a huge community of developers who have created functions and features to extend WordPress. Need an e-Commerce shop? No worries, we work with 4 different e-commerce plugins.  Need to connect your website to your CRM? covered. Need a mobile version to display on smartphone? covered. Want a social network style site for your community? got one of those too!  We constantly monitor, experiment, and use a huge range of plugins and functional extentions to make WordPress work for your website, no matter what you need.

3. Flexible Designs

Using WordPress doesn’t mean that your site has to look like a $10 template, or like every other site out there.  We work with Thesis and Genesis frameworks which allow us to design a custom site, or theme, on top of WordPress. Have a look at Margan Family Wines, Marketing Angels, Daniel Bentley Fine Jewellery, or Garfish Seafood Restaurants to see just a handful of our work and how a bespoke WordPress website can compliment your brand.

4. Grows with your Business

In other systems, your website often becomes a snap-shot of your business at the time. Products, services, staff, and the marketing message … even your branding, logos, colours.  In other website technologies this would be hard-coded into the site and become a difficult and expensive exercise to change.  With WordPress, your website becomes a dynamic part of your marketing.  Your WordPress site can evolve as your business does. It is easy to change menus, messages and images to reflect what you know about your audience.  Combined with Google Analytics, you can learn about your website visitors and continually tailor your site to provide a better and better experience. You can quickly and easily put up test pages and do split testing for ad campaigns and marketing initiatives.

5. Future Proof

Future Proof – what this means is that the investment you make today in your website will become a lasting, and growing asset of your business. The fact that WordPress is open source guarantees that the large community of developers will continue to enhance and improve WordPress, and your website is not chained to a specific company or proprietary CMS. By choosing WordPress you are choosing a platform that you can extend and continue to grow as you need in the future – you can add plugins and features and functions, you can redesign your front end theme and keep all your content.  You will never have to rebuild your site from the ground up, rather you can renovate, change and manage what you have. Changes become quick and easy up-dates once you start down the WordPress path.

The Australian WordPress Experts

At TheDMA, we are passionate about WordPress.  We see positive results for our clients everyday – better marketing outcomes, search engine results, websites that are an on-going asset to their business. To find out how our passion can benefit your business contact us on 1300 871 470 or complete our contact form and we’ll get right back to you!

Converting your website to WordPress is a great way to gain the benefits of WordPress, and make your existing web presence really work for you. We get a number of enquiries each month from people who want to convert their existing website into a WordPress website.  They may have read about some of the benefits, which include:

• More control over your content – change images, text, etc – as you wish without any cost!
• Adding dynamic content such as blogs, news, focused articles on specific topics.
• Ability to embed videos (from YouTube or Vimeo).
• Having an easy to use e-commerce or shop.
• Having great SEO results.