Global Advanced Media

Wordpress

Wordpress - Custom Design, Fixes, Customization, Unhacking, Help

We launched a self hosted wordpress install here in November 2005. We've been updating, hacking, fixing, troubleshooting, modding and shouting about it ever since.

  1. Need a new wordpress install? We do that.
  2. Need some fixes for a wordpress site you've already got running? Check.
  3. Need some help with a design thing, a custom theme, or a single graphic? Can do.
  4. Custom CSS, PHP, even javascript if we need to.
  5. Have optimization problems? A bad google pagespeed?
  6. Your wordpress hacked and you need unhacking and security? Gotcha.
  7. We love, and sometimes pull our hair out about, wordpress.

It's kind of tough to iron out a good google pagespeed score with many wordpress installs, but we've managed to pull off some big gains, often getting close to 100%.

We've worked with other wordpress professionals and helped other users in the wordpress help forums for years. We make suggestions to the wordpress crowd and stir debate about things the wordpress controllers roll out. We give back and give a shoot.

Contact me to discuss what you are looking for and what we can do to help make that appear!

*We are not affiliated, endorsed by, own any part of WordPress or Automattic or their associated things. They have all rights and ownership of all that. They don't even know us, aside from the occasional poke in the wordpress forums or in the wp-tavern comments :)

Wordpress Downsides

Not all web hosting setups have everything needed to run wordpress or the latest things to run it as well as it should be run. Some hosts don't include PHP and SQL which is needed for it to run, and some hosts that offer those things do not offer the latest version of PHP to the basic hosting packages.

Wordpress (in most situations) is open for you or your team to login from anywhere and do things like edit pages or create new posts and add pictures. The downside of this is that every day there are thousands of 'bots' running around the internet trying to login to everyone's wordpress so they can get admin access and do the sorts of things hackers do. More on that in a blog post perhaps.

Wordpress also creates things dynamically as they are requested in most cases. This is great when you have stuff that changes a lot, like a new special of the day or you have other new things to share with your visitors on a regular basis.
This does make a web server work extra hard just to serve up a page of content, as opposed to simply handing am html document to the visitor's browser, it's need to think and create the top, and pull the pictures, and create the bottom, and the menus, and run other background tasks when a page is requested.
This requires a slightly more powerful, and sometimes more expensive web server to run. Especially if you want pages to be delivered fast, and that is something google looks for when choosing what pages to put in the top of it's search results.

Wordpress also pushes updates for it's core engine frequently, and most sites will have plugins and themes that also update regularly. Sometimes these are security issues.
You can automate some of these things, and these days updates don't usually break a site or design / theme... but it can happen. Someone needs to be on the lookout for updates and check that things don't break when they happen.

We have a special system that can avoid some of these issues if you do not need to change your site often, and do not require a contact form, we can use wordpress to build your site, then create static html pages from that. Then we can 'turn off' wordpress and just serve pre-made / static pages that wordpress created.

Backups are not automatic with a base install of wordpress and are gold when you need them.
Sadly some premium themes are plugins will break when wordpress does a major update, and sometimes the only way to get a fix is to buy the premium theme or plugin or custom code help again.

It's happened to us with a few projects. You buy a premium theme, maybe it's 60 or 80 dollars, spend a significant amount of time getting the premium theme to look and work the way you want it to, and then wordpress does a major update and the theme does not work like it used to. Many premium themes and plugins only come with a year of updates. So if there is a newer version that works with the latest wordpress, you have to pony up another payment.

I have sites on the web built in basic html that have not changed or updated in years and they function fine without special security measures and web server performance issues. Those sites don't give the ability of team members to login and add pages and upload photos and change theme designs quickly and easily.


So there are trade-offs

Brand New to Wordpress?

It's a great platform for many things. Out of the box it's easy to add pages and edit content. Handles photos and videos well and many things are easy to change up. Colors, styling, sizes, once you know where to look it's simple to adjust these things in most situations with a wordpress based site.

Take a look at some of the free theme designs you can use from the wordpress theme directory.

Wordpress can do all sorts of extra things with thousands of free plugins, become a shopping system with payments, a real estate portal, business directories, there's even free plugins for launching your own social network similar to facebook - all free extensions for wordpress.

There are also many premium ecosystems based on wordpress, premium themes at places like themeforest, premium plugins like speed boosters, and all sorts of things. There are many professional coders around the world that specialize in wordpress, so if you choose to have a site based on WP - you can find professional help all over the world and via many portals (shout out to upwork!).

Wordpress powers millions of web sites for many good reasons.

Take a look at some of the free theme designs you can download and use from the wordpress theme directory.

Many of the free themes don't look exactly like they do on the sample thumbnails without doing some modifications here and there, but it is a fast and easy way to choose some design elements you like and want to incorporate into your project. You may be able to do all the customizing yourself with free tutorials and such, or you may want to hire someone that can take the base theme and adjust it a bit. Either way you can save a ton of time and money of the site design side by using a free wordpress theme.

If your business is in a very competitive market, you may want to invest in extra fast hosting for your wordpress site and do some paid upgrades for pagespeed and other metrix that make your site visitors and search engines happy. We do a lot of that, and can help guide you to the things you may need in these areas.

Contact me to discuss what you are looking for and what we can do to help make that appear!