WordPress Website Design

This site is a WordPress site, a ‘blog’ (short for weblog).

So why do DesignCredo use an off the shelf site when they have a perfectly good website?

Quite simply the sites serve different functions and putting it even simpler, WORDPRESS IS GREAT!

WordPress comes in two fundamental flavours, hosted and self hosted. If you have a mind to, you can go to WordPress.com and sign up for a blog now. Look we’ve even given you a link, have a go? If you have something interesting that you want to share you can be up and running, for free. This is what the web is about.

If you take to it though, there is a fair chance that you will outgrow the free service and will need to consider self-hosting. At this point you can get a WordPress site, download it to your own webspace and customise it to meet your needs. You can add static pages, change the way it looks, change it back again, add contact forms, get great statistical feedback, communicate, share, learn. There is a huge amount of functionality built into a WordPress site and you are able to extend it to meet your individual needs.

So Where do Design Credo Come In?

Quite simply we can set it up for you, make it do what you want and look how you like. The bottom line is that you will be able to be part of a dynamic marketing tool that will comunicate effectively with your audience.

Claire Schimmer

Schimmer Child have had a static website for several years which has done very little for our business other than being an online brochure. We have recently replaced it with a WordPress site with the assistance of Design Credo and are very happy with both the service we received and the finished site. Design Credo have been incredibly helpful, their instructions are concise and easy to follow and they have patiently repeated everything until we feel confident we can continue to administer the site on our own. We sent it to a particularly critical client for comments and the verdict was ˜fantastic!.” Thank you Design Credo. Claire Schimmer

…case study: Sarah Treble

Sarah Treble is a wedding dress designer with an international reputation who has recently relocated to the South-West. Although Sarah has had a website for many years it wasn’t optimised very well for Google and quite simply the only way she could find it through a search was to put her name in the search.

Further to this Sarah’s Brand needed updating and of course Design Credo were able to create a new simple brand.

With the new brand sorted we were in a position to create the new site. The brief for this site was to,

• Update the look
• Improve the fortunes of the site on Google
• Make a site that Sarah could update herself

Sometimes we are surprised ourselves at the speed that improvements can be made. Within days of the new website being made live it was getting Page 1 results on significant Google searches, and with a bit of keyword work we were able to extend the range of searches that the site performs well with.

Now Sarah is involved in updating the site herself, adding images, reporting current news. This of course is the main reason we recommend the WordPress platform to our customers, it ultimately puts them back in control of their websites.

…case study: Nest Interiors

Nest Interiors is a stunning and special shop in Topsham specialising in French and New England style interiors. Although the company has been around for quite some time the existing website that a number of people had worked on didn’t really reflect the quality of the Nest shop.

Initially Design Credo planned to develop this site as a static three-column site, it worked and looked great. However as we had been working on the new site we became more aware of our customer’s needs. The shop changes regularly, sometimes daily, and there is now reason why the website shouldn’t be able to reflect the change. For this reason we decided to use the WordPress platform to base the new Nest Interiors site on.

Design Credo have been able to do some support photography for this project but the whole point of using WordPress is that the customer is in a position to maintain the site themselves.

Since going live the new site has been welcomed and very well received by customers, we have just this week heard of a large furniture order that was as a result of seeing products on the site. Again Search Engine Optimisation has been high on our list of priorities for this site. Perhaps somewhat bizarrely enquiries have recently originated from St Tropez.

What was that , coal, Newcastle?

…case study: pdm Architecture

Phil Domville-Musters is an architect based in Topsham, near Exeter in Devon.

The brief for his website was really rather simple,

“I want a site that looks like my existing site but I want one that works.”

Basically Phil had a website that had a content management system (CMS) that didn’t do what it was meant to. Although adept at using computers, an integral part of Phil’s successful business the existing website was clunky and inefficient.

As part of the project Design Credo did some work on the logo and brand that PDM were using.

It is early days yet for the site but we were very reassured by the comments from Phil

Andrew knows what he’s about, and that’s just good, well considered design, he can lift ordinary into extraordinary, that’s design. Philip Domville-Musters

…writing the blog

How To Create a Post for WordPress Blogs
Categories and Tags in WordPress

…adding functionality and value to the blog with plugins

WordPress Plugins Baby

…when things go wrong

I Can’t Get Out of Maintenance Mode

…growing the blog

Getting Your WordPress Blog Seen by Google

How to Ensure That Your Blog Grows, (Give a Little)
10 Blogging Tips to Break the 30 Seconds Barrier

…preparing images for the blog

Need To Resize or Edit a Photo But Don’t Have The Software?
Don’t Gamble With Your Image (Part 1)
Improving Your Image (Part 2)
Halftone Effects: More Than Just Pop

Chrissie Saunders

I’ve asked the lovely Andrew of Design Credo, who I think looks like Sean Connery, to do a guest post for me. Being fairly new to blogging I often find myself on his blog looking for hints and tips on the more technical stuff. He’s not only knowledgeable but explains it clearly unlike many of the technical blogs that I come across. I hope you find this post as useful as I did. Thanks Andrew. Chrissie Saunders