For Marketing Leaders
Do you want to better understand the process of building a website? Our WordPress web development specialist is here to help.
I wrote this article for readers who are interested in learning about our web development process. It’s based on the exact process we’ve used to build and rebuild dozens of WordPress sites — including The Finn Group, Australia’s largest business broker, where this process cut load times by 60% and grew business listing views by 75% in three months.
This information is primarily for people looking to build their first website or those who may need a website upgrade. In either case, my team and I have you covered.
The most essential goal of website design and development is to keep it simple and make it easy for your customers to find what they need. It’s no surprise that what people value most about a website is how easy it is to find what they want!
Here is our 4 step general approach to developing your WordPress website, this is our process and it works like magic. Learn more about our website design services in Australia.
Step 1 – Business and website brief
In the first step, we meet to help our team better understand your business. We are interested in learning about your industry, your customers, and what you are currently doing to drive sales.
For example, when we briefed Tento, a Japanese restaurant in Sydney, the goal wasn’t ‘a nicer website’. It was to reduce friction and get more bookings. That clarity shaped every decision that followed, and bookings rose 67% within four months of launch.
The more you share, the more we know about your goals. This approach helps us deliver the best results for you.
We then discuss your website idea and what you pictured it to look like. Together, we plan the web design and functionality to create the wireframe in step 2. We also discuss whether you want to use a template or custom web design, as it will impact the total web development cost.
Step 2 – Wireframe draft
Once we get a deep understanding of your business, we develop the website wireframe. This is the blueprint of your website and includes all the different elements you wish to include. Together we will decide how to organise the elements to achieve better interaction with a call to action.
The main question is: where do you want your audience to go, and what do you want them to do?
Getting this right is where conversions are won. For example, when we restructured the user journey for Sell Gold Sydney, one of our longest-standing client relationships. Conversions increased by 265%, before any traffic growth. The changes we did were small in terms of design, but very impactful.
Once we finish the website wireframe, we will ask you for feedback so we can make any changes you wish. We use Figma for this process as it is super simple and intuitive for our clients to view and leave comments. Usually, 1–2 feedback iterations are enough to achieve the desired result for the wireframe.
Our clients usually provide Copywriting for the website wireframe. This is the text that goes on the website’s pages, such as the home and blog pages. If needed, our WordPress web development team can write the copy for your website.
Step 3 – Web design proposal
In this step, we use the wireframe created in Step 2 to design the website. We either use a client-chosen template or custom-make the design from scratch. A custom-made design is more expensive because of the longer design process.
Once we finish the website design, we ask you for feedback so we can make any changes you wish. As with Step 2, this usually takes 1-2 iterations to reach the final design result.
With a website template, there are usually some limitations regarding design options. A custom website offers greater flexibility and is better suited to clients looking for a distinctive look.
Step 4 – Web development
Once the website design is complete, we will start developing it using WordPress web builder. In this step, we put everything for the website together, including the design, copywriting, SEO, plugin integrations, etc. Performance work happens here too. For The Finn Group, we migrated a very large WordPress site to AWS hosting and rebuilt the back end with custom APIs, improving load times by 60% and user satisfaction by 45%.
WordPress offers more flexibility in functionality and customisation than platforms such as Wix and Shopify.
It is also important to note that WordPress templates are not always built using appropriate guidelines. Before you purchase a WordPress template from a third party, make sure you do some research about its performance. Looking up the template designer and customer reviews would be a smart idea.
If you purchased a bad template, it would typically have slow load times and technical bugs that could give your customers a terrible experience. Upgrading an existing template is not recommended, as they are usually extremely hard to code and improve. If you purchased a bad template, our best advice is to buy a better one or get a custom-made website.
Google’s own Core Web Vitals documentation confirms page experience signals affect rankings. One more reason template quality matters.
Final words about WordPress web development
The big advantage of WordPress over other site builders is design and development flexibility. It makes it easier for developers to edit, especially if you are looking for complex customisation. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are great if you are not constrained by the editing limitations of their templates. With WordPress, you can do almost anything, with more control over your site’s performance and design.
We’ve seen this play out across industries: SheMaps grew from 23,000 to 72,000 annual visits in 8 months after their rebuild, and OES increased traffic by 43% in 3 months. Custom WordPress builds give you the technical foundation those results require. Browse more examples in our portfolio.
WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging builder to a powerful platform that you can use to build many types of websites, including blogs, business websites, project portfolios, forums, ecommerce, ratings websites, membership sites, eLearning, modules, chatrooms and communities, galleries, personal websites for self-promotion, job boards, business directories, Q&A websites like Quora, non-profit websites for collecting donations, wikis and knowledgebases, Media-centric sites like YouTube, auction and coupon sites and the list goes on!
The WordPress user interface is easy to learn and manage. You can do perfectly fine without any coding experience. A few educational YouTube videos should give you the foundation to start managing your WordPress website. It is also built for improving local SEO performance, with intuitive tips and data to give you a better chance of ranking higher on Google.
There is a sea of free articles, videos, and courses available to improve your WordPress skills. WordPress has been around for a while (since 2003), so, beyond educational content, there is a huge community that actively helps one another. This includes WordPress developers dedicated to building new plug-ins, making software improvements, and continuously contributing to the open-source software.
If you are not sold on WordPress, just Google which famous websites are built on WordPress. You will be surprised to see which big brands use this web builder platform. Such brands include Disney, BBC, Microsoft, Star Wars, Sony, TED and Zillow.
