- WordPress
- 7 min
7 Reasons Why a Custom WordPress Theme Is Better for Your Business
With so many ready-made themes availabe on the market, do you really need a custom WordPress theme built for your website? Read this post for the answer.
Over two decades into its existence, WordPress continues to hold its ground as one of the most popular web platforms among businesses across various sectors. Despite the emergence of modern website builders like Webflow, Hubspot, Wix, and others, WordPress’s appeal remains as strong as ever before.
One of the key reasons why businesses love WordPress is that it facilitates adding and editing content on their websites. In this post, we want to pull back the curtain on one of our recent projects, where a business chose WordPress for that exact reason – streamlined content management.
This project showcases yet another time our unwavering commitment to providing the most efficient and cost-effective solutions to help our clients succeed.
Here is the story.
The Client
The Playground is a “strategic design studio that helps brands become more human.” They build brands and digital presence for businesses regardless of their current journey stage, from ambitious startups to companies that have outgrown their beginnings and are looking to play big.
The studio offers a wide range of services, helping businesses plan, define, create, and execute their marketing strategy. Among the rest, this includes executing digital marketing campaigns and website development.
We’ve been fruitfully collaborating with The Playground for over five years now, developing functional websites of all scopes and complexity levels and internal systems for their clients.
The Challenge
The Playground reached out to us for assistance with the redevelopment of the website of their client – a London-based lettings agency Winchester White.
This was not the first time we did work for this real estate firm on The Playground’s request. Previously, we had developed the front end of their internal portal, designed to monitor employee performance and facilitate training.
As for this new redevelopment project, The Playground designed the old website in 2019, and the build had been handled by Winchester White’s existing developer supplier.
However, managing the content on the website proved to be very challenging due to the limited capabilities of the native CMS. Whenever the agency’s staff wanted to change something on the pages , they had to turn to the development team for assistance. That was extremely inconvenient and time consuming.
Therefore, it was decided to design and build a new website using WordPress as the content management system. The Playground had also recently rebranded Winchester White, so the agency wanted to redesign the site to reflect the new brand positioning.
While the redesign part was The Playground’s responsibility, our task was to convert those new designs into fully-fledged web pages.
The client wanted the pages to be responsive, sticking to the corresponding breakpoints:
- Desktop: 1280px
- Tablet: 1024px
- Mobile: 768px
Another important mission of our WordPress development team was to integrate Winchester White’s internal system for pulling in the property listings, called 360, into the new website.
Apart from that, Winchester White requested help with installing and configuring several plugins to streamline their operations, analytics, and content management.
Once the client approved the quote, we got down to building the website.
The Solution
The Front-End Stage
Since the scope was quite extensive, we divided the front-end stage into several milestones or batches that included specific pages and groups of pages as well as third-party integrations:
- Homepage
- Pages: Making Letting Simple, Landlords Stories, Corporate Lets, Tenants
- Pages: Request a Valuation, Property Management, About us
- Pages: Careers, Culture, Area Guides
- Pages: Short Lets, WinWin, Property Management
- Pages: Contact, Journal
- Pages: FAQs, 404, etc. This batch also included third-party integrations.
Apart from converting the new designs into clean, fast-loading, and semantically correct HTML/CSS code, we added several dynamic JavaScript effects to the new pages:
Here are some other JavaScript effects that we created:
- Burger menu
- Open and close
- Tabs
- AJAX load more
- Get-in-touch form response popup
- Cards: Desktop-to-mobile slider rebuild
- Smooth anchors
- AJAX filter + sort
- Google map + custom pin + popup
Just like Winchester White requested, we also made all the web pages responsive across devices.
On finishing each batch, we showed the work to The Playground for feedback and approval. Sometimes, they had comments, but on the whole they were more than satisfied with our quality and attention to detail. In their words:
The build on this project has been so great – very accurate to our designs, and the team have added nice touches like the animation of the +/- on the accordions. It feels like your team on this has been very focused and considerate. Thank you!
The Back-End Stage
Implementing Custom Post Types
Once the front-end development phase was over, we switched to the back end. First off, we implemented the custom post types with related fields according to the client’s specification:
- News (default post type), which included fields like Title, Date, Author, Category, Intro para (ACF area), content, excerpt, and more.
- FAQs (custom post type), which included Question (page title), Answer (page content), and Section (custom category type), and other fields.
- Staff, including fields such as Job title, Photo (image), Bio (text), Linked testimonials, Email address, and some others.
Additionally, we tagged all custom post types, enabling the website administrator to filter them by different tags.
Assisting With Installing and Configuring WordPress Plugins
Winchester White wanted their new website to use several WordPress plugins for handling various business tasks, from content management and SEO to analytics and performance optimization.
The problem with installing too many plugins is that they frequently conflict with each and may negatively impact the loading speed – a critical user experience factor that can make or break a business, especially one that’s totally online-based.
However, we have tremendous experience working with all kinds of WordPress plugins and can fine-tune them for the optimal performance. We reviewed the list of the plugins provided by the client, selected those that could add real value, and then installed and configured them on the new website.
The list included the following plugins, both free and premium:
- ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Redirection
- Contact Form 7
- Yoast SEO
- GDPR Cookie Consent
- Property Hive
- YIKES Simple Taxonomy Ordering
- WP REST Cache. We installed this plugin because we encountered a performance dip with the property map due to the sheer volume of data. WP REST Cache allowed us to mitigate this issue by caching requests to the REST API, enhancing the overall efficiency and responsiveness.
- Advanced Custom Fields: Extended
- Advanced Custom Fields: Table Field
- Advanced Custom Fields: Image Aspect Ratio Crop
- Sticky Posts
- Stripe Express (Premium)
Integrating the System for Pulling In Property Listings
With the essentials out of the way, we finally got to the point where we needed to integrate the internal system for pulling in property listings. This was Winchester White’s proprietary solution, and it functioned perfectly on the old website. The client expected it to work seamlessly with the new website as well.
The CMS didn’t need to have the functionality to add the property listings. The system already did that. The information from the system was sent to the website using Rightmove BLM format. Essentially, it involved FTPing a zip file with the property details along with images every couple of hours.
When investigating the example BLM files the client gave us, we faced some issues that could significantly delay the development because we needed to create a system for integrating the data itself. That would also lead to an increase in the cost.
Since we always seek the most cost-effective options for our clients, we recommended an alternative solution – a WordPress plugin called Property Hive. Even though the BLM import add-on that came with the plugin required certain investment (with no changes to the quote), it did exactly what the client wanted.
Purchasing and using the add-on would save Winchester White valuable time (up to three weeks of custom development) and, thus, money down the road.
We suggested this solution to the client, and they gave us the go-ahead. Once the plugin with the add-on was installed, we configured it for the best performance. Now, pulling in the property listings from the internal system into the new WordPress website is as fast and effortless as before.
Additionally, the website’s visitors can choose how to view the properties – as a grid or as pointers on the Google map. They can also filter them by various criteria such as price, lease duration, number of rooms, etc., as well as sort properties from higher to lower prices or vice versa and by the listing date.
The Outcome
The Winchester White project is one of the most interesting and challenging projects that we’ve done for an agency. Despite a large scope and a number of technical obstacles, we not only overcame all of them but also provided the client with an opportunity to get the work done faster and with a lesser strain to their budget.
As usual, our commitment to the success of our clients extends far beyond design-to-code conversion or website development. We also migrated the website to the agency’s server on the Nimbus web hosting platform, configured it for optimal performance, and launched it.
During this process, we faced a number of technical challenges. However, thanks to our vast experience working with a variety of servers, our skillful engineers were able to effectively troubleshoot and resolve all issues.
Our collaboration with The Playground continues. Whenever our expertise is required, they can always reach out to us for consultation or assistance.
Want to be our next happy client? Contact us today.
