Designing a WordPress site with aeweb

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aeweb often builds sites in WordPress for several important reasons:

  1. WordPress is a free, open-source content management system; it can be set up quickly and inexpensively, making it perfect for smaller-budget clients. aeweb base rate for WordPress setup with a prebuilt theme and basic customization is $300.
  2. Because of its efficiency and cost, WordPress is used by many people; therefore, there is lots of online support available.
  3. Similarly, there are hundreds if not thousands of free designs (“themes”) for you to choose from: see the WordPress free themes directory.
  4. WordPress is a relatively easy system to learn, so people who aren’t Web designers can do some of their own site management.
  5. The fact that WordPress is open source means that many developers have built plug-ins that can add complex functions to your site quickly and easily — for example, shopping carts, membership systems to deliver premium content, event management systems, dynamic forms — all of which work efficiently using the core WordPress functions. These features can be added to an existing WordPress site for a fraction of the cost of paying a developer to design a Web application just for your site. Search the WordPress plugin directory to see if there is a plugin for the feature you want.

So what’s the downside? What you will trade, for all of the advantages listed above, is full control over the specific appearance of your site. It is perfectly possible to build custom themes for WordPress based on client design specifications; however, this will likely more than double the cost of your project. Customizing a prebuilt theme can be a good compromise. This site, in fact, is built using the Twenty Eleven theme with the customizations noted below.

aeweb’s customization of prebuilt templates includes:

  • A custom header for your site using your photos, graphics, logo, and color choices (or aeweb can design a header for you)
  • Customizing the overall theme color scheme (color of text, headings, borders and backgrounds)
  • Navigation placement (left sidebar, right sidebar, horizontal, vertical, or both)
  • Custom sidebar widgets (a calendar of blog posts, a site search box, your contact information, etc.)
  • Custom footer (contact and copyright information, navigation links, etc.)

Of course your content — the text, pictures, and graphics that are specific to each page of your site (as opposed to items that appear on every page) — is always personalized by you, and presented exactly the way you send it to us electronically.

Helpful WordPress links

Don’t forget to search Youtube; you can find some excellent WordPress tutorials there.

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