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WordPress Developer based in Cornwall
Fort Marketing can support your business with two approaches if you choose WordPress as the content management system for your website, as follows.
Bespoke WordPress websites - We’re skilled in building Wordpress themes for your website from scratch. This approach ensures you get the design and functionality you require. We concentrate on providing minimal code to ensure your site is as fast as possible.
Theme Installation - We’re also happy to support you with installing ready-made themes and to, optionally, install and train you to use a page builder. For example, the divi page builder.
Please note we are not a creator of bespoke plugins but can help you source appropriate plugins for various tasks.
With either approach, we can discuss the pros and cons with you before you commit. It is also worth considering how you will be using WordPress; it isn’t the only content management system out there and if you’re looking after a site which doesn’t have thousands of pages then it might be wiser to consider other options which provide faster performance and better protection and portability of your content (i.e. the ease of moving it from server to server). Again, we can discuss this with you and present you with the ups and downs of different cms systems as-well-as giving you demonstrations.
We’re based in Falmouth, Cornwall but happy to work with you wherever you may be.
WordPress - the most popular CMS in the world
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. It’s estimated that around 25% of the world’s websites are powered by this content management system. That’s quite a statistic and is often the reason cited for choosing WordPress. We’ve used WordPress as the content management system for promoting a number of different businesses and projects in Cornwall.
Be found by customers
As part of our Wordpress website design service to you we’ll also discuss with you what your objectives are for different keyword phrases that you would like to perform well in. We can make recommendations on how to structure your content to give you a better chance to achieve your search engine objectives. At the end of the day please be assured that the biggest positive impact you can make on your Google results will be through a) lots of excellent, logically structured content and b) inbound links from relevant, quality websites. WordPress, itself, is not a magical cure for poor performance in the search engines!
We can set up and train you to use the Yoast search engine optimisation plugin which will help you optimize articles for your website. For example, you may be targeting a segment of the population of Cornwall for your product or service; once you have researched the keyword phrases used by this population to typically find products like yours, then the Yoast SEO plugin will support in ensuring you have the correct amount of keyword phrases in the right places on your landing page to give you the optimum chance for ranking well in the search engine results pages.
Designing your WordPress website
Your new wordpress website will be a responsive website suitable for viewing on mobile, tablet and desktop screens including the really big wide ones! We always aim to provide a site that will connect with your target audience and support converting visitors into customers.
If you require special page templates for specific information then we can create these as part of the WordPress build process. We have supported businesses in Cornwall in creating exciting landing pages with core messages that encourage their website visitors to make the next desired step, whether that be enquiring or perhap downloading a brochure. Landing pages like this tend to be very modular and in these cases we can create a special administration area to make editing of the page as simple as possible.
Migrating your content to your new WordPress website
You may not have used WordPress before or you maybe looking to have a new WordPress website. We’ll look at your current content and work through a plan to ensure that it is successfully migrated to the new site and that any link equity (i.e. pages that have been linked to) is not lost during the process of creating the new website.
Performance of your Wordpress Website
It is highly likely that performance (i.e. how quickly your site responds) is a factor that is taken into consideration by Google and therefore can have an impact on your position in the search engine results pages. With a content management system that uses a database it’s very important to ensure that minimal code and plugins are used without compromising your message and the overall impact of your website; this is our strategy when building bespoke WordPress websites. If you would like a super-fast website and you are not managing thousands of pages then you should consider discussing with us using Jekyll or Grav for content management.
Performance of your website could make all the difference in the search engine results pages. For example, if you are targeting ‘WordPress websites Cornwall’ as a keyword phrase and if you have very similar levels and quality of content as a competitor then it could boil down to performance on what page rank is finally assigned to your web page in comparison with your competitor.
Securing WordPress
WordPress is the most targeted system for hackers to attack - this is due to it being the most popular content management system in the world. So, it wouldn’t be right to be discussing WordPress without discussing security. Naturally we want to ensure our clients are as protected as possible, so at Fort we implement a wide range of tasks to reduce the risk of your WordPress website being hacked. If you use WordPress it is essential that you keep the system fully up-to-date as-well-as all themes and plugins - when we develop a bespoke WordPress website we use a minimal amount of plugins to reduce the possibility of not being able to upgrade WordPress due to a plugin not being compatible with the latest WordPress update.
For WordPress websites that we host we backup your database (containing all your posts and pages) daily to Amazon’s web services (one of the biggest cloud providers in the world) and also ensure that the WordPress functionality is backed up to www.github.com - a repository for code bases. This ensures that in a moment of disaster your website and its content can be recovered.
We would recommend this approach to all our clients in Cornwall, and beyond, as a best-practice way of securing your content.
Training
Before handing over your WordPress website we’ll ensure that you have full training so you know how to use the system, have a basic idea of search optimization using the Yoast plugin and also any image editing software for cropping and adding images to the library.
If you are based in Cornwall then we are happy to conduct the training face-to-face, if you are based further afield then we can implement the training using video conferencing and screen sharing software.
If you’re thinking about a WordPress website and you’d like to know what options you could have, or alternate systems then please give us a call to discuss - we’d love to hear from you, we’re based in Falmouth, Cornwall but we are happy to work with you wherever you may be based.
By: Tim Bowerbank
Role: Web Developer