Bespoke Website Design & Development
Yes, we can build a website for you.
For about twenty-five years, we have been building client websites using WordPress or Shopify to create effective, flexible and customisable marketing platforms to get your message across or e-commerce shops to sell your products.
Our focus is always on what will work best for our customers in terms of how efficiently and cost-effectively we can get their business in front of as many of the right people as possible.
Try one of our audits to kickstart your digital presence
Whether you are starting out on a new venture or have a well-established site we are certain that we can provide useful, actionable insights to give your business a boost
Why choose AlphaQuad and WordPress for web design and development?
Our aim is always to build a findable, robust, reliable and cost-effective website to present your business to the rest of the world. To do this it needs to be:
- On a stable platform (WordPress hosted with Catalyst2)
- Built with tools that are flexible, intuitive and usable by non-technical editors (Themify and a suite of tried and tested plugins)
- On-brand (thoughtful page designs implemented with (S)CSS in a child theme to keep things consistent)
- Well-written (useful, readable, expert content, written with SEO in mind)
The AlphaQuad team has the experience to deliver on all these key points supporting each other across all the projects we are involved with.
Please get in touch and have a chat with one of our team if you have any questions about future projects.
Don’t think that a WordPress-based website will look generic. We can customise and tailor our chosen framework’s modules to provide a site as individual and unique as your business.
Design and development services
All our development happens in-house – we value flexibility, direct communication with our clients and hands-on control over our projects*. Most websites are fairly straightforward and we find that most layouts and functionality can be implemented well directly from our favoured page builder. Other requirements are generally well served with plugins which is one of the main benefits of building with WordPress. We find it stops us from having to say no to feature requests due to technical issues or budget constraints.
Hand Coding
We have a background in hand-coding HTML and (S)CSS which means we don’t just work on the WYSIWY side of WordPress. This makes getting the most out of WordPress page builders and putting together a robust, unique theme for your business a lot more efficient. It also helps a great deal with troubleshooting if anything odd happens and is invaluable when we are looking at sites from a Technical SEO [in page link] perspective.
Server-side
We have excellent technical support server side from Catalyst2 our hosting partner of many years. They look after the infrastructure (two dedicated servers. One for development and one for live sites), and security and can help with technical implementations and integrations. We haven’t found anyone with better response times on queries and their uptime is great too.
Design and layout
On the whole, we keep design in-house and rely on our team’s years of experience to interpret your requirements for brand implementation, especially if you have an established brand or written brand guidelines.
For sites that require a major visual impact to help them stand out in a crowded marketplace, we work with trusted design partners, videographers and photographers to ensure assets represent your brand positively.
Page layouts are driven by the combined requirements of the content and brand. We plan the required content based on research and work out the flow of the page using wireframes and sketching. We avoid crowbarring content into predesigned layouts as we have found that this is rarely a recipe for success. This is also why we use a flexible, modular page builder rather than prescriptive page templates. You won’t have to wait two weeks for a template tweak to present a new type of content or add a new feature to existing pages.
Optimisation isn’t just for the benefit of your visitors; it’s for search engines too.
Optimisation
As we aren’t in the business of throwing sites onto the web so they can be ignored, we make sure that what we produce is well-optimised both from a content and a performance point of view.
Technical SEO
From a development perspective, we focus on technical SEO which means, simply put, that the pages are set up correctly with the right structural elements available to make the content as accessible, understandable and findable as possible for search engines and humans alike. When content is added to whichever module, it makes visual sense while making semantic sense in the code behind it, and all the elements that are required for a search engine to understand what the content is about are available to use. This includes but is not limited to title and description elements, Structured Data and Alt attributes for images.
Performance
Search engines like Google and Bing like a website to be quick to load. They don’t want to send their users to a site which will frustrate them by taking an age to show the information or provide the service they are looking for. In a crowded marketplace, the difference in search engine ranking between you and your competitor may come down to how quickly Google thinks your page loads in comparison.
Hosting
As a foundation for good performance, we have chosen a hosting service that provides a great connection and whose infrastructure gives good response times to page requests, and allows us to compress the images and other assets that are sent to browsers to build the pages that the end user sees.
Caching
When a page and its assets are cached it means that the server doesn’t need to build it from scratch with calls to the database etc every time a visitor wants to see it which makes the response time from when the visitor hits Enter to when they see the page on their screen much quicker.
For sites we host, we use a caching and optimisation service in WordPress that integrates with the server software to produce the best and most customisable results possible.
Assets
We are working in a time when throwing a lot of data around online is very easy. Sharing photos, video and music isn’t a big deal and we rarely have to worry about just how big that amazing cat picture is that we are sending to friends, family and the rest of the world.
However, when we first started to build websites bandwidth was very limited and it was necessary to optimise every file that went online. Huge image files would take ages to upload, make site visitors wait for minutes to download and cost a fortune to store online. We still take the same care to optimise images today because, even though it may take no time at all to upload from our desks, we can’t assume that the person viewing them is at a desk with cable connectivity, or on decent wifi, or even having anything better than a clunky 3G connection. Google makes the same assumptions – when they decide how quick your site is, they measure it on a simulation of a bog standard smartphone running on slow 4G and they assume that the person on that connection isn’t going to feel great about being sent to a site that takes half a minute to download because the banner image hasn’t been optimised, or that there are thirty-two product images that haven’t been set to lazy load.
Plugins and services
We always try to keep the use of plugins and external services under control. The ones we do use will have been tested on our development server before they are sent into a live environment just in case they cause problems.
An ongoing partnership
While we are quite happy building a site and handing it over, we thrive on long-term partnerships. No matter how well planned and executed a build has been, there is always work to do to improve rankings (‘build it and they will come’ really isn’t a strategy that works) and keep your site in the focus of search engines. . Most of our clients keep us on post-build with a flexible digital marketing retainer. This will cover reporting and associated strategy suggestions, content production and publishing. We can also help with social media strategy, production and publishing.
Consultancy
If you have a project in mind and need a sounding board, or help with putting together a specification to put out to tender, we can help. If you haven’t specified a website before it can be quite daunting to make sure you have hit all the relevant points – there is so much to think about beyond the core features that make it fit with your business and. it can be costly to have to go back to a project to drop overlooked features so it is worth taking the time to get it right the first time.
Get in touch
If you have a project that you would like to discuss, get in touch and we will be more than happy to talk it over with you in person or by video conference.
*We have used offshore partners in the past and have worked with teams in other agencies. We are happy to discuss this if it is one of your project requirements.
AlphaQuad Dedicated Server features
- Hosted on a fully redundant VMware cloud with Dell Hardware
- Full Firewalling and 7-day rolling offsite Backups
- Automated malware scanning
- Proactive server and website monitoring
- Automated Security Updates
- Instant Failover to new server on our VMware cloud
- 4Gb disk storage quota (more if required)
- No bandwidth limits (within the server infrastructure capacity)
- Lightspeed server
- OS: Centos 7
- Drive size: 60GB SSD
- vCPU: 4
- RAM: 10GB
- Control Panel: cPanel
Your WordPress Partners
We aren’t just WordPress experts; we are front-end developers, marketers, copywriters and SEO experts. All in one building, working together, sharing insights and knowledge to make your site better than your competition.
The process and relationship doesn’t end with the launch of your site. We will continue to work with you to make sure your site is secure, optimised and, above all, discoverable. This is as important for the owner of a bespoke e-commerce web application as it is for a startup trying to build an audience for their service.
Read more about WordPress in our Digital Digest
Here, we share digital marketing insights, tips, and discussions that help you stay up to date with the latest trends in today’s digital landscape.
How to Start a Podcast
Is your content hiding in plain sight?
Sutcliffe Website Redevelopment
Have a look at what we’ve done for other businesses
Our case studies pull highlights from some of our past projects and will give you a flavour of what we do and how we do it.
Sutcliffe Website Redevelopment
AlphaQuad Website Redesign and Rebrand
