Developing a website from scratch has so many layers to it.
There’s an important initial strategic phase, followed by compelling digital storytelling, clever coding and smart website design – all optimised for search and keeping the end user front and centre.
A custom-built WordPress website can be your hardest working employee… if done right.
Many business owners who seek the services of a digital marketing agency aren’t necessarily well versed in the technical side of website development.
That’s why it’s easy to fall into the trap of buying pretty looking off-the-shelf websites with established themes and limited capabilities. See, that is exactly the problem – while it may look beautiful, it may not really work for your business.
But when you start the conversation with your trusted digital marketing agency, you’ll be amazed at the capabilities of a custom WordPress website.
In essence, WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS), meaning that its users are continually populating and updating the open-source library and contributing to keep it running. At Brilliant Digital, we only use WordPress in building brilliant custom websites for our clients. And there’s a multitude of reasons why we’re sticking with WordPress.
“The free ‘self hosted’ WordPress is great for beginners. With a few clicks of a button, you can install it on your website or even to your computer,” explains Brilliant Digital’s Senior Project Manager, Stephanie Croucher.
Because it is such a popular system, with WordPress powering over 30-40% of all websites, there is a lot of help available and a ton of resources.
One of the most important things in developing a website is keeping the user in mind. Our team of strategists, content creators and website developers have worked hard in the last ten years to refine what and how we implement WordPress on our websites, while keeping the CMS easily manageable for users.
“This is not an easy feat! We have incredibly skilled developers who understand the relationship between building an incredible system, with all the bells and whistles, while still keeping it incredibly manageable on the back end,” says Stephanie.
“Probably the most amazing capability of WordPress is its (almost) infinite flexibility – the limit is your imagination! There is no kind of website that cannot be built on WordPress, which is pretty amazing,” explains Stephanie.
The White House actually uses a WordPress website and even the Microsoft Blog is created using WordPress.
“Because it is an open-source community, contributors are consistently creating upgrades and plugins to assist with upgrades, to continue to ensure a fantastic and seamless user experience.”
WordPress is also extensible, which means your website can evolve indefinitely alongside your business.
Want to incorporate a blog forum? There’s a compatible plugin. Need a timetable on a page? It can be coded in. Within the confines of good web and end user focused design, there is really no limit to the power of WordPress.
What Google thinks of your website might be one of our most important considerations when refining your digital brand and building your website. Because you want people to find you on the internet, you need to impress Google. And Google loves WordPress websites, because Google loves good SEO!
Stephanie explains: “Because WordPress has been around for so long, it has matured alongside Google, so developers have continually kept up with guidelines and changes in the Google algorithms to be able to continually meet these criteria.”
WordPress is an incredibly SEO-friendly solution. At its core, WordPress has a lot of great SEO features (not to mention what you can add and customise), which include things like:
To add more functionality and benefits to your WordPress website, there are extremely useful plugins available.
“In my opinion, SEO plugins are some of the smartest plugins there are out there, given that the primary purpose of your website should be to drive up your digital presence through ranking well on Google. Plugins like Yoast and All in One SEO are sophisticated tools that allow you to improve on-page SEO scores without a lot of difficulty,” says Stephanie.
Extending your website to your newsletters and EDMs, the CF7 and CF7 for Mailchimp plugins are handy to create neat and tidy contact forms that allow you to easily engage with your audience and can connect to your Mailchimp database.
Stephanie adds: “Wordfence is probably one of the most important plugins you can have on your website. It’s a security based plugin and adds a firewall to the website to block malicious traffic.”
Implementing and managing ERP integrations for your website become easy because of WordPress’s integration capabilities.
A custom professional WordPress website is the best solution if you’re looking to create a website that is uniquely you, that speaks directly to your market and delivers a return on investment many times over.
While a custom design will be more costly than buying a theme, you will get a much greater return on your investment.
When you get your website right from the beginning, you won’t need to redesign it every six months as your business grows. A successful WordPress website will see you through two to three years of solid business growth and set you up for the next iteration.
Building a website requires leadership and strategy to succeed. It needs a digital strategist who can look at the total picture, understand your market and build a brand strategy that will resonate with your market.
Strategy and leadership add significantly to the success of your WordPress website. This is where you will find the greatest value.
Work with a website designer and strategist who have a track record of designing WordPress websites that look fantastic, work seamlessly across devices and send a strong and consistent brand message to the market.
At Brilliant Digital, we’ve built many hundreds of business websites for our clients… and each of them has delivered the same result – sustained brand growth.
Contact us to start a conversation.
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Brilliant Digital has been amazing! They provided a very professional and high-quality service. They understand the niche areas to target when building websites, which has helped make our website a Ferrari with a strong engine, rather than something that looks good but doesn’t bring in the clients. Thank you, Brilliant Digital!
Accounting For Good has been working with BD since late 2018 – starting with a website refresh and snazzy update to our logo. They’ve curated a solid website with great SEO. I can write, but it’s easy to get distracted and forget to write your content, so outsourcing is such a great option. I *love* our BD content writer – it’s a real partnership. She understands our business and gets the tone I want so spot-on that I think she can actually read my mind.
Brilliant Digital has helped me grow my family business. Once we developed a fully functioning, professional and productive website, we doubled our client base, and we continue to have consistent inquiries. We will definitely be continuing our professional relationship with Brilliant Digital and use their services for our future endeavours.
Positive: Professionalism, quality, responsiveness
Brilliant Digital has a wonderfully friendly, helpful and knowledgeable team and has been invaluable to my business.
Our business website was looking dated and needed a revamp, and we weren’t happy with our current website managers, so we shopped around and were immediately drawn to Brilliant Digital. We set up a meeting and a few weeks later had a great new website, and we’ve had great feedback from clients since about the new look. The website has no doubt drawn new customers to my business and I feel that it has been worth every cent spent.
But wait there’s more!
Brilliant Digital has been a fountain of knowledge on all aspects of internet and web marketing and social media, and we’re really grateful for their knowledge and expertise and the huge impact they have had on our business.
My website has been critical to my success. It is literally the face of my business… it’s the shop window.
I can’t recommend Brilliant Digital highly enough. It is the only company that has taken the time to gain a deep understanding of me, my business, what I want to achieve and where I want to go with it.
Our website was up and running in six weeks as promised. I couldn’t believe it, actually. Our first website was such a long, tortuous process.
Brilliant Digital has done everything they said they would do. We’ve never had a problem, even with all the increased traffic from the new marketing campaigns. We’ve been very happy!
We really feel that the end product was just at such a high standard. It’s really crisp, really clean, and it’s gone from scope all the way to that delivery piece. It’s been quality all the way.
We value that and we think the Brilliant Digital team has far exceeded our expectations.
We are a very busy medical practice that recently engaged Brilliant Digital to develop our website and online presence.
Straight away we realised we had found someone with invaluable marketing experience, who explained in plain speaking the pitfalls and advantages of the online world.
This allowed us to get on with the more important issue of running our practice.
We have received lots of positive feedback regarding our website and mobile site from many of our patients.
When we came to Brilliant Digital, the selling point for us was the strategy. It wasn’t just about building a website; it was about having a philosophy.