Are you preparing to build a website for your business but don’t know how to approach the task without making mistakes that could result in a slow, heavy, uneditable, or poorly constructed site?
In this article, I’ll guide you step by step through the process of creating a comprehensive website. We’ll start by choosing the best partner to design and develop your site, then move on to defining your goals, selecting the appropriate CMS, and much more.
Since we’re on the topic of CMS, in this article, we’ll focus exclusively on WordPress, as we believe it’s the best solution on the market for building virtually any website or online store. Of course, this system has certain limitations, and everyone needs to be aware of them. In brief (as there’s another post coming on this topic), we’ve managed to create WooCommerce stores with more than 20,000 products in their inventory that still perform incredibly fast.
Even a seemingly simple website can be poorly executed, which could result in ongoing issues, a loss of trust among partners, or, worst of all, your customers no longer taking you seriously.
Defining the Budget
If you’re looking for the cheapest contractor and that’s your main criterion, you can stop reading this article now. However, if you’re serious about this, defining your budget will help you quickly make important decisions about your website and allow you to align your budget with your expectations. Often, seemingly “simple” functionalities can be very expensive. A company that cares about its potential clients will try to match your budget to your possibilities and expectations.
With lower budgets, ready-made solutions are often used, which today are of really great quality—you just need to know which ones to choose, and it’s even better if you have some experience in using or extending them.
Some might immediately say that such ready-made solutions are amateurish and not worth it, but we disagree. Yes, there are plenty of plugins or templates on the market that are so bad it’s hard to know what to say, but since we’ve been doing this for over 14 years, we know which ones are well-written, and those are the ones we recommend to our clients.
Below is a list of a few that we use so you can judge for yourself:
- https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/pro/ – ACF Pro: Needs no introduction, one of the best tools for “extending” WordPress.
- https://theeventscalendar.com/ – A high-quality plugin for managing events.
- https://bricksbuilder.io/ – In our opinion, the only true and incredibly fast “builder” for WordPress.
Defining functionality
This is one of the most important things that will help us keep the budget in check and avoid unnecessary misunderstandings.
The most important question you should ask yourself is: “What is the purpose of my website?”
If you plan to create a company website that is primarily informational, aimed at presenting your product in the best possible light while the entire sales process occurs through traditional channels, then the only functionalities of such a site will be a contact form and the ability to edit content. This way, you can independently change or add a new post, page, embed a video, or update the URL to your social media profiles. If you see items like “Automated Testing” in the quote for such a site, run as fast as you can because you are likely to pay much more than the site is worth. Are automated tests important? Of course! But no one does them for such sites because it makes no sense. Manual tests should take no more than a few hours, and honestly, they’re not even worth mentioning… The person responsible for the development can easily test everything themselves, and it won’t take long. Remember, you’re getting a site built on the WordPress system—it’s really hard to mess up something when creating this type of site.
If you plan to create a store or a complex site with lots of functionalities, it’s worth spending some time preparing everything properly.
When it comes to stores, we always work with the WooCommerce system—it already has many built-in features. It’s worth familiarizing yourself with its documentation. First, you’ll be able to assess whether a company is trying to sell you a feature that’s already available (yes, this still happens), and you’ll also get to know the system, which will help you quickly get up to speed with its operation.
Once you’ve gone through the built-in features, it’s worth considering what additional functionalities you might need. Additional WooCommerce store features might include:
- WooCommerce Product Configurator: This allows you to configure a product in various ways. For example, if you sell bicycles, the customer could choose the color, wheels, or drivetrain. Or if you sell furniture, they could select the upholstery color and type of wood.
- Additional Payment Options: Nowadays, most reputable companies have ready-made plugins for the WooCommerce system. It’s worth checking these out before spending a large sum on creating a custom module.
- Different Pricing for User Groups
- Recurring Payments
There are many options, and it’s worth writing them all down on paper, holding a long meeting, and discussing everything. An experienced project manager can quickly prepare a solid estimate based on this.
Setting up a wireframe
A wireframe is an approximate layout of your website. Often, even at the wireframe stage, we prepare an initial graphic design that we apply to the prepared skeleton to better visualize how the website will look. Of course, this isn’t always possible and largely depends on the complexity of the project.
A wireframe is a great tool because it helps to discuss all the previously defined functionalities and allows for the identification of errors, whether in the functionalities themselves or in communication. Sometimes, it can simply happen that the client and the developer don’t fully understand each other—things that are obvious to a developer may not be so clear to the client.
Select a programming method
There are many methods you can choose from when creating a WordPress website or a store on the WooCommerce system. We recommend two, depending on the budget and scale of the project.
Custom WordPress and WooCommerce Theme Development
The first option, which can be considered a premium option, is to create a custom theme for WordPress or WooCommerce from scratch. The theme will be dedicated and tailored to a pre-prepared graphic design. There are no compromises when it comes to functionalities. You receive a finished product that can easily handle hundreds of thousands of users or stores with thousands of products. We won’t delve deeply into the technical aspects here, as that’s not the focus of this post, but it’s worth mentioning that there are many ways to approach programming such themes.
We place a strong emphasis on ensuring that themes or plugins created by our team are easy to use and, most importantly, “written” in such a way that their maintenance and development are smooth and enjoyable. How do we achieve this?
- We structure the folders in themes or plugins so that it’s easy to quickly “jump” into the project and make any necessary changes.
- We use best practices when preparing templates—there’s no great mystery here; we are well-versed in PHP and WordPress documentation, and we strive to stay up-to-date and respond to changes.
- Any developer entering the backend of our projects will find their way around in minutes because writing documentation and commenting code is something we take seriously.
WordPress and WooCommerce Development with Bricks.io Builder
If the budget for the project is smaller or if the website doesn’t require a specific approach (i.e., you don’t expect to have 20,000 products in your inventory), we often opt to build the site using the Bricks.io theme, which is essentially a builder.
Unfortunately, builders have a bad reputation in the market, but Bricks.io proves that it’s possible to create a great tool that stands out from the rest.
The most important thing that sets Bricks.io apart from other solutions is the fact that the entire system was written without using the jQuery library, which allowed for a significant reduction in file sizes and truly harnessed the potential of JavaScript to create an incredibly fast tool. Another noteworthy aspect is the HTML code generated by the builder—in contrast to the competition, everything is remarkably “clean” without an absurd amount of nested elements.
Interestingly, when saving each page created in Bricks.io, the system automatically generates styles (many of them are added inline), meaning that each individual page only uses what is necessary, without loading a lot of unnecessary styles or scripts.
Many of our clients successfully use Bricks.io, including websites visited by tens of thousands of users each month.
Choosing the right server
The server is an extremely important element of any well-functioning website or store. There are many companies on the market that offer great solutions, but we’d like to recommend one that we believe is among the very best.
When working with our clients, we always use servers from Kinsta.com. Below is a brief list of reasons why we consider it to be one of the top companies on the market:
- 24/7 Support: You can speak with a real person at any time.
- Daily Backups: Plus, additional modules allow for even more frequent backups.
- Excellent Caching: Along with many other tools for website optimization.
- Staging Environment: The ability to create a testing environment for your site.
- Developer Tools: Access to SSH, Git, and many other tools for developers.
- Server Location Options: A wide range of server locations, so everyone can find a location that suits them.
It may not be the cheapest option, but for the price, you get peace of mind and the assurance that when problems arise, you won’t be left to deal with them alone.
Going Live!
Once the website is designed, fully developed, and transferred to the production server, it’s time to go live! But before you do, there are many important things to keep in mind.
There are two approaches, and which one you choose depends on whether it’s a completely new website or one that already existed.
Let’s start with a new website.
Below is a checklist that we always keep in mind when going live. This is the absolute minimum because much depends on the specific website, but to give you an overview, here it is:
- Installation of an SSL certificate
- Optimization of all images
- Enabling caching
- Ensuring the website can be crawled by search engines (e.g., Google)
- Adding all meta titles and descriptions
- Adding schema structured data
- Adding a favicon
- Adding a sitemap
For websites that already existed, in addition to the above list, there are a few elements that are extremely important and, if done incorrectly, can ruin the position you’ve worked hard to achieve in Google over the years.
You must ensure that the URL structure remains the same, and if there are any changes, they should be handled with redirects and prepared in a way that search engines understand. It’s also worth checking if you have any high-quality backlinks from reputable domains—changing URLs in such cases can be costly, so proceed with caution. Before changing content on pages that have a strong ranking, think twice. If everything was working well, it’s worth keeping the content as it is because your ranking might be affected. Make sure to correctly transfer all content as well as meta data; losing meta descriptions or titles can impact your ranking and how your search results are displayed.
Conclusion
Creating a website has never been as easy as it is today, but on the other hand, it’s a very challenging and complex process that requires experience. That’s why we believe it’s always worth entrusting this task to an experienced team who will do it right, allowing you to focus on growing your business.
