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WordPress services

wordpress logo WordPress (I’ll call it WP for short) began life as free blogging software. Now it’s that, and much more.

It’s currently one of the most popular publishing platforms on the web. Just check out their showcase.

You can download WP from wordpress.org, for free, and install it on your web server (most hosts support it). You can also set up a blog on wordpress.com, where the software is maintained for you—you just blog.

If you want to push WP past its already great out-of-the-box capabilities, there’s a host of mostly free plugins (which extend WP’s functionality) and themes (“skins” to give your site a new look-and-feel) available.

Still, even though WP allows you to do a lot, you don’t necessarily want to spend all your time configuring software, testing out plugins, learning security best practices, and dealing with the inevitable technical snags that come up. Also, you may want a custom design implemented as a WP theme on your site, or mould your WP site into something more specific than even the huge range of plugins out there will allow.

That’s where someone like me comes in. I’ll work to get your site how you want it, and my general philosophy is to follow WP’s philosophy: to empower people, as far as possible, to do things for themselves.

Not just for blogging

WP is still relatively blog-oriented, but “WP as CMS” (using WP as a more general Content Management System) is now pretty well established. From features now built into the WP core, through various plugins designed to manage content in different ways, to site-specific hacks that I can implement, WP these days powers sites that are miles away from the usual idea of a “blog”.

Possibilities include:

It’d be catchy promotional copy to say “the possibilities are limitless”, but it wouldn’t be true. WP isn’t the solution to everyone’s web publishing needs. If I don’t think WP is suited to your project, I’ll tell you. If I think it is, though, I can make it work for you.

Blogging and the social web

Of course, it’s no bad thing that WP comes with everything you could want from a blogging system built-in. Together with the comprehensive range of plugins geared to hook your WP site into the various social networks out there, it lets you get on with the business of actually communicating—whether you’re blogging, publishing company news, or putting out any other type of regular, chronological content that suits the blog format.

WP includes:

Custom themes

There’s some great free (and premium) themes available, but many people want something built just for their needs.

I’ve got about 10 years’ experience of creating standards-based, accessible, search engine-optimized XHTML/CSS templates from designs (usually Photoshop documents). I’m not your guy to create a new logo or look-and-feel from scratch, but if you’ve got established branding (say, in print, or a current website), I’ve got a good design sense and can easily refine and extend the foundations of a design into a full-blown beautiful site. If you need design from scratch, we can easily bring a trained designer on-board.

I also have around 5 years’ experience working with custom WP themes, and I have an ever-improving “theme foundation”: a flexible skeleton that forms the basis for all my custom themes, incorporating lessons from all my past work. In one sense I create custom themes “from scratch”, but really there’s a lot of learning already in there, preventing the wheel from being re-invented too many times!

This foundation isn’t as powerful as theme “frameworks” such as WP Framework or Thematic (perhaps one day they’ll suit my needs and I’ll use something like them to base my work—right now my foundation serves me best). And while my foundation certainly isn’t “ready to go” (it always needs some work to make it into more than a functional-but-ugly working site), I think it might be useful for some people, especially developers at a similar or lower level of experience compared to me. I’m hoping to offer it here for download on an “as is” basis very soon—watch this space!

Custom plugins and functionality

In addition to being able to recommend the best WP plugins to use, based on years of experimentation, I can also create new ones to do specific things not covered already.

Check out my WordPress plugins »

Security

The price for popularity on the web is being targeted by attackers, be they bored teens or rogue scraps of software. WP, being open source, is able to quickly respond to new security threats, and its one-click auto-updater means installing upgrades is simple.

There are a number of things, however, that can be done to augment WP’s out-of-the-box security measures. I’ve accumulated an array of WP security best practices which are implemented in all my deployments of WP sites.

Search Engine Optimization

More and more people know about “SEO” these days. It basically means making sure your site is built in a way that maximizes your placement in search results on engines like Google.

There are some SEO experts you can pay to implement advanced SEO voodoo tricks on your site and nudge your site that bit further up the rankings. There are also many so-called SEO experts who might charge you a lot for not much at all.

I’m neither. I’ve found that some very simple coding practices, together with some basic advice on copywriting issues, puts a site in a very solid position for search engine placement. And WP makes good SEO easy.

Getting sites linking to yours is the other half of the equation, and I don’t offer any services in this regard. I believe that creating good content and honestly, enthusiastically interacting with the web community in your area of interest will get you a long way in this regard; many services offered that extend past this baseline fall into the grey area between promotion and spam that I prefer to steer clear of. A good product is its own best advertising.

Essential WordPress posts

I try to post as much of my WP knowledge as possible on my blog. Here’s the essentials: