WordPress Website Design

Beasley, a WordPress developer, offers WordPress site design for a very specific purpose: to meet the requirements of our clients who want a well-designed, high-performing website they can maintain in-house using built-in content tools.

Typically these clients want to change to WordPress web design for its ease of use in managing and updating content, a wide set of templates and tools in WordPress theme development, and SEO and mobile friendliness. Or they may have an existing WordPress site which isn’t working for them because it wasn’t designed with their brand and their audience base in mind. We make the required updates and upgrades and they get a site that serves them well.

Although WordPress sites are easy to build with off-the-shelf themes, plug-ins and widgets, they’re not necessarily simple to deploy. As a professional WordPress developer, we start with an understanding of your business and then we propose an appropriate solution. We’ll recommend only those themes which can be modified to give you an exclusive identity (and, when necessary, build themes from scratch using WordPress theme development) and endorse only those plug-ins that have a history of reliability and compatibility.

We’ll also ask you a question you won’t hear from most WordPress web design developers: what metrics will you use to measure results? Our goal is not to build just a pretty site but a business-appropriate, SEO-friendly site. We’ll talk to you about back-end security best practices including disaster recovery, automated backup and defense against external threats. And we’ll ensure you have adequate built-in reporting, done to a consistent standard, to help you measure and achieve your goals.

When we’re done, we can make a hand-off to your in-house staff which can include training or support as required to insure a trouble-free, orderly transition. And you’ll have a WordPress site which will communicate well, be easy to work with on both the front end and back end, and enable ongoing updates without waiting for your IT department.

Website Creative and Usability Audit

Is your current website meeting your objectives for attracting new business and serving existing customers? Does it represent your brand appropriately? If not, what do you need to do to fix it? A Beasley Creative Audit / Web Usability Audit can answer these questions in a methodical, actionable way, based on best practices from award-winning creative practitioners.

We start a website audit with a discovery process including stakeholder interviews and a clean-slate review of the user experience. We want to understand what you’re trying to do with the site and what constraints may be holding you back from achieving it. Does your audience have needs you’re not currently addressing? Is your competition beating you up with a better designed or technically superior site? And, realistically, what are your priorities and available resources for improving your site and maintaining it in the future?

Once we’ve established a benchmark, we dig deeper with an examination of visitor traffic patterns vs intended pathways and heat maps of individual pages. We’ll also review placement and quality of graphics, legibility and communicability of typography and colors, and the quality and tone of copy for both desktop and mobile viewers. At each step of the website audit we’re looking from an independent perspective for potential disconnects between what you want to accomplish and what exists on your current site. Offer placement, interactive mechanisms and priority of information on each page are also considered as are technical issues such as broken links, navigation and duplicate content.

At the end of the website audit we’ll provide a detailed written report accompanied by a live presentation. We’ll analyze our findings and make recommendations for refreshing, removing or replacing content as required along with upgrading creative and technical issues. We’ll show examples that achieve what you’re trying to accomplish and advise how you can get there. From this point, you can retain Beasley for further creative work if you like, but you’ll also have plenty of information to proceed on your own.

Mobile/Responsive Design

Responsive design refers not to the success of your website in attracting new leads and customers (of course you want that as well), but to a coding convention using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The elements of the page are built following the principles of Mobile First web development, starting with a narrow viewport experience. The design is then scaled up and converted for viewing on larger screens. Two modules which are side by side on a desktop screen might shrink on a tablet, and then be stacked on a mobile device. This allows you to control the user experience so that it is easy to get at your content and offers are presented where they need to be instead of pushed to the bottom.

We recommend responsive website development for all new websites and encourage our clients to apply responsive design retroactively, usually starting with your landing pages. In addition to the technical coding skills required, Beasley’s responsive website development team brings a business perspective in which the most important elements will always get the highest priority.

A responsive design tune up is also an opportunity to review the overall interface for your site. Are buttons the right size for a mobile audience? Are individual links easy to press, or are they too close together? Is it easy to find the most useful or important information, or do your pages need reorganization? Does your content reflect the demographics of your audience? Baby boomers might prefer larger type, while millennials like shorter doses of information.

Above all, we can keep you from looking archaic and out of touch by serving up miniature pages with tiny type on a mobile device. That’s reason enough to engage Beasley as your mobile website builder for mobile/responsive design.

Technical SEO Audit

The first step in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) engagement with Beasley is an analysis of technical factors that make content available to site crawlers (or “spiders”) used by the search engines. These crawlers are constantly at work indexing and evaluating content. If they can’t find it because a page doesn’t load fast enough, or isn’t visible through your site architecture, then you don’t get credit for it. As part of our SEO audit we also use technical means to highlight the content that you think is the most important to your potential site visitors.

Some of the specific areas we’ll investigate in this Technical SEO Audit:

• The overall architecture of the site (directory, file structure, dynamic page creation and navigation) to ensure content is presented in the appropriate way.
• Technologies used in developing and displaying the site to make sure pages and images are loading efficiently.
  • We will work with your existing Content Management System (CMS) to identify both known and new technical challenges inherent in the CMS.
  • We will also work with you to transition to a new CMS from a previous one.
  • We’ve performed successful optimizations on WordPress, Joomla, Crown Peak, Drupal, Magento, Volusion, Shopify, SharePoint and hand built HTML sites.
• Functionality of source code and ratio to readable content. Since Google can’t read source code, too much of it (like behind-the-scenes comments inserted by developers) may make your site seem less useful than it is.
• Internal link structure, and identification of incorrect or broken links that keep content from displaying properly.

The deliverable from the SEO audit is a detailed report that includes line-by-line descriptions of issues and recommendations for resolution, which can be performed by you or with the participation of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

SEO Language and Keyword Research Audit

The language and keyword research audit uses semantic analysis to find the terms and topics that searchers are looking for, and then examines the presentation of those terms on your site. We review competitors’ sites as well as your own; if they are consistently ranking higher it may be due to the successful use of certain keywords or focusing on a specific subject/topic.

As part of our keyword research service we identify those keywords, language and topics that will drive the most qualified traffic to your site, we help you close the gap. We then take the information that we’ve learned and craft high performing page titles and meta descriptions to help drive clicks from the search engines.

The location of your keywords on the page is also a key element to attracting Google and by extension, the user’s attention to your most relevant content. Google reads page titles first (the text in the frame at the top of the browser), then headlines and subheads. Your keywords may be on the page, but not where they can be seen easily. A keyword analysis shows you what needs correcting and offers suggestions on how to go about it. You’ll also learn where you might be using too many keywords too close to one another, a process called “keyword stuffing” that can get demerits from the search engines.

A keyword research audit can be a humbling process because often the terms you think are important—perhaps slogans woven into your corporate culture—turn out not to be what people are looking for. This is a good reason to hire an objective third party keyword research service, such as Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, to do it for you. As with the technical audit, the keyword analysis deliverable is a detailed report and recommendation that can be implemented either internally, or by working with us.

Content Optimization for SEO / SEO Content Writing

Search engines are hungry for the same thing your customers and prospects want—valuable, relevant, unique and usable content. Remember that Google and its competitors make money through their ads. The more people who use their search, the more ads they can run and the more money they can make. Content is the engine that drives all search. After you’ve fixed any technical issues and identified what keywords to focus on, you need to make the content on your site as good as it can be, using SEO content writing skills.

You also need to make sure that content is visible. Useful articles, loaded with crawler bait, may be hidden several levels down in your navigation. You may have powerful content with generic or “clever” headlines that are lacking keywords. Minor tweaks by an experienced SEO copywriter to this existing content can often make it more visible and get you search points.

Working on SEO content writing optimization with Beasley’s content writing services very often involves the creation of fresh content from the knowledge base within your organization—product marketers who know how things work, customer relations specialists who know what problems are the most annoying, salespeople who know what benefit statements cause prospects to pull out their checkbooks or purchase orders. Our SEO copywriters leverage this knowledge to create unique, original content that also creates “author authority”—Google’s term for content it can identify as original to your site, and thus more valuable than content linked or repurposed from another source.

For a professional SEO copywriter content optimization is an ongoing process because fresh or regularly updated content gains SEO attention. It’s well worth doing because you won’t just have better search results. At the end of the day, by using Beasley’s professional content writing services, you’ll have a much better website that attracts more potential customers.

Local Search Optimization and Marketing

A leading analyst estimated that 30% of all searches will have “local intent” in 2015. That refers to the use of a location name in a search phrase to find a nearby or local business—such as “San Francisco dry cleaners”. If you haven’t optimized for these results through local SEO, you’ll lose business to competitors who have. And you don’t need to be a retailer or service business with a local physical address to benefit. Professionals looking for local clientele within a service area (“Palo Alto attorney”) or companies that do business in multiple locations also need local search optimization and local SEO services.

Whereas a national SEO campaign aims to attract as many visitors as possible, local SEO wants visibility in a geographically specific area. As a local SEO company, we want to know how you exist in your community—in terms of relationships with organizations, or reviews on sites like Google and Yelp—so we can attract visitors who will interact with you in the way that’s most productive for you and for them. As part of our local SEO services, we can also help you track back store visits or leads to local search, so your efforts become measurable.

A local search optimization engagement with Beasley focuses on both obvious site improvements—like making sure your NAP (name-address-phone) information is prominent on your site—and some small, behind-the-scenes tweaks that can make a big difference. It typically includes local search marketing through targeted outreach to relevant local directories and online outlets. This outreach will increase your visibility within your local community and drive both direct-from-the-site traffic and search-engine-generated traffic.

Link Building Service

Google’s early market dominance was built on understanding how in-bound links to your website show the quality of your site. The more other sites link to yours, the more important your site is to users, and so SEO results heavily reflect the number and quality of referring links. Today’s search algorithms are far more complicated and search for high quality backlinks; link building is a critical component of SEO, as well as a way to gain quality lead and sales traffic from those referring sites.

The first step in creating high quality backlinks is something you’ll want to do anyway: make sure your site is full of original, quality content that other sites will be eager to link to. As a professional link building company, Beasley will identify sites that are desirable and appropriate as link partners through database analysis. Often this process produces some surprising synergy: content that has resided unnoticed for years on your site might be the perfect content to offer a niche audience through a link.

The actual process of building high quality backlinks is not unlike public relations: write a pitch note, customize it to your audience, then follow up religiously. (Because of this similarity in process, Beasley’s link building service often works in partnership with the PR agencies or marketing communications departments of companies who are already making other outreach efforts.) The overall effort might take several months before you start seeing significant new traffic as the result of links, but it will be quality traffic that continues to feed your site into the future, and you’ll get secondary and tertiary benefit as the links to your site are passed along through social sharing.

What about simply buying links, or trading links with completely unrelated sites that offer to trade with you? Isn’t that an easier and faster way to build links? Yes, but it’s also the fastest way to gain a Google manual penalty, through what the search engines term “unnatural link development”. Beasley is a professional link building company, and we don’t do this kind of link building; but we do rescue marketers from consequences by helping them get the penalties reversed.

Mobile Search Engine Optimization (Mobile SEO)

The search landscape recently underwent two seismic shifts. First, Google announced that sites which were not mobile friendly would be penalized on mobile device based searches. Second, the total number of mobile searches exceeded desktop searches for the first time. The takeaway: today, mobile search engine optimization is an essential part of your overall SEO effort.

As a mobile SEO company, Beasley works to build a responsive design within your existing content system. By responsive we mean that as the size of the screen changes, content shifts as necessary to remain accessible and legible. We also make sure that graphics, interactivity features such as forms and buttons, and menus are mobile friendly and that downloadable content is not overly large.

One Beasley mobile SEO services client, Artistic Stone, experienced a 30% increase in conversions after a mobile-friendly site was implemented. The conversion applied to in-store as well as online sales, indicating many shoppers did their research on their mobile devices on their way to the store. Another mobile SEO client, a franchise service operation with many local offices, realized that many of the vendor problems that bring it new business occurred when the prospective client was out of the office. Because the prospect could look up “janitorial service” on a mobile device and then click-to-call, business went up dramatically.

Mobile SEO matters—today more than ever.