Since 2006 Ohio Web Technologies has been developing themes for WordPress. Our team of highly skilled developers are ready to take your Photoshop or other layout design format and develop a custom theme for your business or organization. This is extremely helpful for those that have the design skills or resources available to them to create the design but are not familiar with WordPress enough to convert their design into a published WordPress theme. We can take any static design and convert it to WordPress. This is the same process that we use for all of our clients that use WordPress. We start out designing their website using Photoshop and once the client has approved the design we cut up the design and integrate it with WordPress giving them a 1 for 1 identical functional version of the static Photoshop mockup.
Now of course we prefer to create all of our clients websites from scratch. But not everyone has the resources available to cover the cost of developing a website from scratch. Or perhaps you were visiting one of those template sites and fell in love with one of the designs. This is where we come in. You provide us with the design and we will take that design and develop a WordPress theme for you that won’t break as you update WordPress.
All of our WordPress themes are developed using the standard WordPress codex. This is how we make sure that as time goes on and you update WordPress that your theme won’t break. Now of course we can get into the fancy stuff and do whatever you’d like. But we’ll let you know if your limiting yourself by doing so before we start your project.
Using WordPress as a Content Management System
While many people use WordPress as a blog publishing tool we recognized the power of using WordPress as a content management system immediately. Giving our clients the power to publish their own content as easily as updating your Facebook profile is a powerful tool to have. Through the WordPress dashboard (back end administration section) you can easily edit, create, or remove pages and post from your website without harming the design of your website. You may also have many employees contributing to the website simultaneously with the ability to track who made the changes. All of this happens live! Once you hit the publish button your content is immediately viewable to your visitors.
We are always trying to give our clients control of their website content without the need of a website designer for simple text, image and multimedia changes. When you need to make more advanced changes to the theme itself or if you just can’t get the exact layout you are looking for, we are here to give you the support you need. This concept has saved our clients a lot of money each year.
While not all of our clients have websites that need to be updated heavily, and a lot of our clients prefer that we perform the updates for them, using a content management system will still save our clients money because it is faster for our developers to update their website.
Here is an example:
If you have a traditional HTML website with 40 pages and would like to update the copyright date at the bottom you (or us) will have to go through and edit all 40 pages. Using a Content Management System you can simply make one change and it will change all 40 pages or even better, we can simply program the date to change to the current year and you never have to update the copy right date.
This is only one example in it’s simplest form. The point is that using a content management system can save you time because you can make one change that will effect every page on your site rather than editing every page on your site individually.
Extending the functions of your website
One of the greatest benefits of WordPress is its large plugin database that is available right through the administration dashboard. With a quick search and a click of the button you can add a complete new set of functions to your website using plugins. The plugins that are offered are nearly endless. You can add an Event Calendar, SEO tools, Analytics Tracking, a News Letter plugin or nearly 150,000+ other plugins to your website. This alone can save you thousands of dollars simply because the functions you want to add don’t have to be custom programmed specifically for you, they might already exist and you can get them for free!
WordPress Plugin Development and Premium Providers
While there are many plugins that are available for free, Ohio Web Technologies is here to help you develop or alter new plugins. We have also partnered with a few premium plugin providers in which we help bridge the gap between the end user and the developers for premium plugins. Our premium plugin providers offer specific plugins that you must pay for. In return you get a very well polished plugin that has an entire team of developers working on to constantly update and extend the functionality of the plugins they develop. As a new version of WordPress is released they make sure that their plugins are updated as well.
One of my favorite premium plugins is a News Letter plugin that gives you the power of the well known Constant Contact right through your dashboard. The plugin has worked very well for many of our clients and has really helped boost their marketing campaigns and drive in business. In addition, since we work so closely with the developers, as our clients give us feedback about features they would like, we send those requests to the developers and MANY of those suggestions have been implemented in new releases. This saves our clients thousands of dollars in programming costs because they don’t have to pay for a programming team to extend the plugin. As long as they are patient and don’t mind waiting till the next release or two, they can simply purchase the update for a small fee. This works well for our partners also because they are receiving feedback from the end user. In the end, it’s a beautiful relationship between the end user, their development team (Ohio Web Technologies), and the plugin developers.
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