Softwired Blog

Building a new WordPress website is a project in and of itself but it should be seen as a living thing that needs ongoing support throughout its life. Once the site is ready to publish, businesses will need to decide where to host their site and who will provide ongoing WordPress support to ensure the security of the site and content management training so edits can be made as needed.

Millions of websites are built on the WordPress platform all around the world. In fact, as of 2020, WordPress is powering 35% of the internet. When a website is brand new it should, in theory, have all updated plugins and security features installed. But what happens after the website is built and several months have passed? Website owners need a plan in place for who will update security plugins, prevent and handle website crashes and hackers, fix unresponsive websites, and ensure that they can edit the website as needed. All of these issues can be addressed through WordPress support.

Engineering WordPress systems for web design is a highly complex process requiring expertise on many levels. It's a common misunderstanding the WordPress isn't a great platform because of the poor quality displayed on some WordPress websites. Nothing could be further from the truth and I'm here to debunk this belief.

Websites range from small and simple to large and complex because the needs and budget of each business varies greatly. Web design agencies generally offer three or more web design pricing packages to suit the needs of their potential clients. Your budget and needs will have you considering factors like the level of customization, e-Commerce, newsletter and event calendar integration, and chatbot setup. No matter what web design package makes sense for your business, each package should ensure that you end up with a high-quality website built to generate traffic and leads to your business using responsive web design. It should also be SEO optimized, compatible across web browsers, and convey your brand and message through a great user experience – including quick loading speed.

If designing your own website is out of the question because you don’t have the time or the expertise or you tried a do-it-yourself website platform with disastrous results; you may be thinking about finding a web design agency to help you. On the business-to-business side, digital marketing agencies may be looking to hire the right web design agency partner to help them design websites for their clients. But how does anyone know which web design agency to hire?

Full-service marketing agencies offer web development as part of their digital marketing services. Some large agencies have in-house development teams to handle this work while others choose to outsource web design in a web development partnership. An agency partner can be particularly beneficial to smaller marketing agencies or to agencies who wish to focus on their primary areas of expertise and leave web development to the web design specialists.

One of the things most often overlooked is how to set up your WordPress website for content management.  I've seen some "Franken Systems" where pages and posts are all mixed together.  If you have hundreds or even thousands of pages it can be a nightmare to manage.

One of the easiest ways to set up the admin is to create custom post types.  These are posts that don't fit into "posts" which are the blog and "pages" which comes with WordPress.  By setting up custom post types you are creating what is called a taxonomy which is a complicated term for categories.

There are many concerned about WordPress security from hacking and other malicious activity.  This is a topic that is continually coming up and I'm constantly informing our customers.  Let's start with the basics.

Is WordPress secure?

Not unless you do some basic maintenance first.  This is the most common problem when developers without a lot of experience start working with it.  Out of the box we need to do some basic hardening, follow best practices, and perform on-going maintenance.

There's so much out there in the world of website design and these standards are changing rapidly.  In the early days it took an expert programmer to create a website.  These days you can rapidly deploy sites in literally minutes without any programming knowledge.  This has diminished the value of the work to develop the software that is running your website.

This has been amplified with the huge surge of WordPress and all the free plugins that make a feature rich website.  More an more I'm finding over the years I don't really have to do much coding to get a site up and running with any feature I want.  I can simply cherry pick plugins that do most of the fuctionality I'm looking for.

Recently our hosting servers were attacked by a botnet of hacker programs attempting to gain access to the WordPress admins via brute force attempts.  The programs run thousands of login attempts usually against the admin username to try and crack passwords.  The requests come so fast that the server eventually slows down trying to keep up with the requests and crashes.