At Web Design York I have been frequently asked if I can repair or optimise an existing Wordpress site. In each case I have been asked the previous web designer is no longer contactable, leaving their client with a broken site with symptoms such as:
Images that do not load properly on certain browsers
Images that when the client loads them are not formatted properly and fill the page
Odd items shown on the screen that are in fact small code extracts that shouldn't be there
I have no experience with Wordpress although in my role as SEO consultant I have talked to people who are experts and from what they tell me Wordpress is:
a) Prone to being hacked
b) Has to be regularly maintained with the latest versions of all the modules, otherwise it can start to malfunction
Given these issues and also the fact that a lot of Wordpress sites I see start to look very similar I have steered well clear of Wordpress.
I can always take a Wordpress site and design something better of course, using the same text and images you have already!
I can offer various styles of gallery pages including simple thumbnail images that are clickable and expand into a larger image and various styles of scrolling slideshows.
At Web Design York I have all the professional grade equipment to produce a short video introduction to you and your product or service, hosted on Youtube or Vimeo. If you have a large selection of videos to display these can be shown in a gallery.
Content (text and images) maintainable by you the client.
This is particularly useful for content such as pricing where you want to have complete control over what is shown.
A blog is a great way to ensure that you have fresh content on your site which is a strong positive help for SEO
Logo and Icon design to enhance the look of your site
SSL secured sites with a padlock as standard
Detailed forms with checkboxes and multiple selection boxes to capture customer details and requirements
Every site needs both a domain name (also known as a URL) and a hosting package. A hosting package is where the data files containing your text, images and the code for the site etc are stored and the website is served from. The computer that your website sits on is sometimes referred to as the server.
At Web Design York, I generally ask my clients to purchase both of these items themselves. That way the account is in your name and you will get the bill for domain and hosting when it falls due, not me. There is no benefit for either of us if I pay for your hosting package and then collect this sum from you.
Please talk to me first about where to purchase your hosting package from. Not all hosts provide the same level of technical infrastructure and operational software. For example to provide you with Blogging and Content Management I need access to be able to run level 5.6 of something called PHP and that will soon change to level 7.0 Many hosting companies I have talked to, even now at the end of 2017 are not running with even level 5.6 of PHP, even though active support for this level expired in Jan 2017.
If you have already purchased a domain name then that is OK but I will probably want to transfer it to my preferred hosting provider so that the domain and hosting are together in the same place.