We finished most of this website rebuild months ago but we did some final touches including some SEO improvements these past couple months. We won’t mention the name of this client at this time because they’ve since decided to redesign the site again before launching (long story).
The over all project was to take their old site, give it a facelift, improve its performance, increase it’s traffic, and make it easier to add content. I think we accomplished all of those goals.
We put a lot of thought and energy into making the site easy to maintain and most, if not all, of the content can easily be edited by the client without needing to pay a developer. The client can add carousels, tabbed sections, buttons, product sliders, product showcases, story showcases, and category showcases. This helps them create beautiful and functional pages all without developer time. The more content they create, the more traffic they’ll get, so making the site easy to maintain also drives our goal to increase traffic.
One highlight of this project is our use of Gutenberg blocks and enforcing a hard separation between data related code (found in the plugin section of the site) and view related code (found in the theme section of the site). This is something that we’ve seen very few of our competitors do, but that provides lots of benefits. For instance, it will give future developers the ability to manage the data and view separately, making re-skinning easy. A lot of time and money is invested in creating the content, so we don’t want to risk loosing that investment when the company needs another facelift.
Part of this project was to allow users to dynamically see the product information and inventories in the client’s legacy ERP system. We created a custom WordPress plugin to manage that integration. This integration makes the site more valuable for potential customers and in-turn more valuable for the company.
Another benefit of this site is document management. This client has a lot of documents that they share with their clients and these documents need to be updated often. To help them with this task, we created a documents post type to give documents their own section. This will allow them to manage these documents with ease.
We also created several different page templates that the client can use to add pages at-will. These templates include: About Us Page, Blog and Blog Filter Pages, Business Owner Page, Career Page, Document and Document Single Page, Customer Stories, Front Page, Location Contact Page, Products Page, Sales Product Page, Search Page.
We ended the project with a little SEO structure work. We optimized the site code and images to signal to search engines that we’re a credible place for users. We did some work making sure we don’t have any broken links when we launch the new site. We also implemented some code to make sure images are sized right and served in next-gen formats. Lastly, we improved the page speed so the site loads fast. As you approach perfect browser scores you get diminishing returns, but we’re happy with the scores we ended with:
