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.