- WordPress
- 5 min
5 Common Myths About Traditional WordPress vs. Headless WordPress Debunked
Is a headless CMS better than traditional WordPress? It all depends on what you are looking for.
At GetDevDone, we love helping our clients bring their dreams to life, whether they’re solo entrepreneurs or massive enterprises with thousands of employees. Today, we’d like to share with you one of our favorite projects: building the BizDeva website.
In this endeavor, we had the pleasure of working with a talented sales expert who wanted to boost her personal brand online. Starting from scratch, we created a custom design that exactly captured her essence.
Then, we brought that design to life by converting it into a sleek WordPress theme and adding some amazing dynamic effects to it, applying a combination of hand coding and the power of plugins.
Throughout the process, we worked closely with BizDeva, making sure every step aligned perfectly with what our client envisioned. The result? A stunning, functional website that not only looks great but also provides a seamless user experience.
Here are the details.
The Client
BizDeva, led by the accomplished sales expert Maryna Nikitchuk, is a dynamic force in the world of sales development and management. With over 20 years of hands-on experience in B2B SaaS sales, Maryna is passionate about helping businesses optimize their sales processes.
BizDeva offers a comprehensive range of services, including:
- Revenue Generating Machine Review: Identifying areas for improvement and focusing on priorities to enhance sales performance.
- Sales Development Strategy: From job descriptions and hiring processes to tailored test tasks and successful hires, BizDeva ensures effective sales development strategies.
- Workshops and Consultations: Maryna’s workshops and one-on-one sessions provide valuable insights into business operations, sales strategies, and personal development.
Whether you’re looking to refine your sales strategy, build a strong team, or elevate your personal brand, BizDeva provides the support needed to achieve your goals.
The Challenge
Our collaboration with BizDeva started earlier this year when Maryna turned to us for assistance with creating a custom website to promote her personal brand online, encompassing both our design and development expertise.
As she had no previous experience in website building and content management, we provided comprehensive guidance and support for her throughout the process, and Maryna welcomed our designers’ and developers’ ideas with open arms. This open-minded approach brought a blend of excitement and challenges as we charted our course together.
The Solution
Design
The project began with creating the website design. First, we crafted a mood board that showcased a variety of fonts, color themes, and design elements.
This helped us capture the essence of Maryna’s brand from a visual perspective. To our pleasant surprise, this initial phase received almost instant approval.
Building upon those ideas, we went on to create the website design. In particular, we did the following:
- Seamlessly integrated the BizDeva logo into the design.
- Incorporated hand-written elements to reflect the longstanding tradition of the BizDeva hand-written diary, a key part of Maryna’s brand identity.
- Developed a distinctive color scheme to set the website apart from similar expert sites, which predominantly rely on green color schemes and therefore tend to look somewhat monotonous.
Red is the client’s preferred color, so we used it as the main criterion in selecting other colors. We found a variation of red that attracts rather than repels and chose non-conflicting background colors to show femininity and softness, as the client wanted.
As a result, we created a design that perfectly balances brand identity and functionality. It exudes a light, “sugar & spice” feel, reflecting a sense of unity with the like-minded community Maryna connects with and truly representing her persona.
Development
Once the design phase was finished, it was our front-end and WordPress developers’ time to take the center stage. First, our front-end experts converted the design into a pixel-perfect web page and created some custom animations and interactive effects by using plugins or hand coding from scratch.
Next, our WordPress professionals built the custom theme in the editor.
Let’s take a look at some notable features that our dev team crafted.
Testimonials Carousel
The Testimonials Carousel is probably the most engaging feature of the BizDeva website. To develop it, we used the Swiper mobile touch slider, customizing it to match the design. Here’s the result:
Popups
Using the Fancybox plugin we created lightweight popup windows with BizDeva’s client testimonials that were too long to fit in the card, easily configuring their size and timeout. Here is an example:
Text Truncation
To truncate multiple line content on a testimonial so that it fits the design, we applied the dotdotdot JavaScript plugin. It adds an ellipsis to the end of the truncated text to indicate that there’s more content to explore. The plugin also enabled us to add the READ MORE button after the ellipsis.
Animations on Scroll
To animate the page content on scroll, we integrated the Motion One web animation library. It uses hardware accelerated animations so that the user interface is responsive and snappy regardless of the load.
Take a look at how the logos and lottie animations (the red handwritten text, lines, and drawings created by our designers) are set into motion. We configured the lottie animations using the LottieFiles Web Player.
Custom Cursor
Another great feature that showcases our developers’ skills. Depending on the page element where the cursor is positioned, it changes its size and transparency. For instance, when you hover the mouse over a LET’S… button or over the header elements like the social media icons, the cursor turns into a transparent circle with a red border.
At the same time, when you place the mouse over a client testimonial in the carousel, the cursor grows larger, and the word DRAG with two arrows appears inside it.
To make all this magic happen, our dev team wrote custom code by hand.
Events Page
We also installed and configured a plugin to add information about BizDeva’s current events to the website, making it easy for users to track these events as well.
Multilingual Support
We made the website multilingual using a versatile plugin Polylang, which enables seamless content translation and management. Currently, the website supports two languages: English and Ukrainian. However, if BizDeva decides to expand her target audience to specific regions across the globe, we can add more languages as needed.
The Outcome
When the work was done, we gave the client a comprehensive tour around the admin panel, explaining how to update and add textual and visual content to the new website. In the end, Maryna was completely satisfied with the result. Here’s what she said:
It only took us two phone calls and one slack chat to reflect my vision of BizDeva. Of myself. At last. Things have simply become the way they should be. It didn’t take us long to finalize the result that makes me happy even now!
The development of the BizDeva website took us 70 business hours (50 hours for the front end and 20 for the back end). Maryna got an engaging, visually attractive, and functional website to promote her outstanding sales expertise on the Internet, grow her clientele, and ultimately boost revenue.
Want to be our next happy client? Reach out today!
