DreamLight Designs, Develops, Manages & Hosts an Award-winning New WordPress Website for a Growing Medical Facility
When a local medical facility had outgrown their existing website they turned to DreamLight to custom design and develop a new WordPress Website for their growing clinic. Their existing website was originally designed before responsive design principles were commonplace so it didn’t properly support newer devices like tablets and smart phones. Responsive design allows a website to dynamically re-flow the webpage layout based on the width of the device screen. A responsive website looks great for all viewers from those using high resolution widescreen desktop computers through tablets and all the way down to various smartphone mobile devices.
Their previous website was built in Joomla which is a solid content management system (CMS), however it wasn’t as easy for them to update or add content as they wished. WordPress is often easier than Joomla and other CMS systems for users to update and add content. In fact WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world with 60% of the CMS market and its closest rival Joomla has only 5%. This is largely due to WordPress’ ease of use. As WordPress experts we built them a new WordPress website that they could more easily update and add content in-house.
In addition to designing and developing their new WordPress website we also set up over 120 email accounts for them and we manage, maintain and host their website as their webmaster.
New WordPress Website Award & Client Testimonials
DreamLight and our client, Agility Orthopedics, were thrilled and honored to receive a bronze award for this client website from the 2019 iNOVA AWARDS international competition for corporate websites. We won the bronze award in the Corporate Websites category for Health & Wellness.
See what our valued clients have to say about our custom WordPress development on this website:
Quality:
Service: Value:
“Throughout the process of creating our website Mike was professional, efficient and communicated effectively. Our expectations were exceeded with the final design and quality, thank you!”
– Beth C., Clinical Operations Manager, Agility Orthopedics
Quality: Service: Value:
“Working with Mike is an absolute pleasure. He delivered our website project exactly on schedule, helped with nonwebsite transition of our email IT coordination, and coached us on SEO elements to make our website more productive.”
– Christian A., MD, Partner, Agility Orthopedics
Creating Visual Impact with an Animated Parallax Slider
Responsive Design for Mobile, Tablet, Laptop & Desktop
Today people view the web on a wide variety of different sized devices from high resolution widescreen desktop computers, through laptops, tablets and all the way down to the smallest smartphones. A website that was originally designed for desktop computers will leave tablet and smartphone users frustrated because they’ll have to not only scroll up and down but also left and right in order to view the entire page. Or to avoid scrolling they’ll have to zoom out so much that the content on the page becomes microscopic and unreadable.
Responsive Page Headers for Different Device Sizes
When developing a modern website we custom design the content layout for a number of different screen sizes often starting with the smallest mobile devices. This is called mobile first responsive design. We effectively design four to five different versions of the website so that it will look optimal on any viewing device. This is accomplished by using various media queries in the SCSS/CSS style sheet coding.
Responsive Page Layouts for Different Device Sizes
Responsive web design allows a website to dynamically re-format the webpage layout based on the width of the device screen used to view it. Therefore a responsive website is optimized for all viewers from those using high resolution widescreen desktop computers through laptops, tablets and all the way down to various smartphone mobile devices. This includes standard definition screens, Retina high resolution screens and beyond. You can test if a website is a responsive website by viewing it on a desktop computer and dragging the right edge of the browser window to the left and right. As this resizes the browser window the content on a responsive website will dynamically re-flow as the window gets narrower or wider in order to provide optimum viewing. On a non-responsive website the content would be cropped and you would have to scroll left/right or zoom out in order to see all the content.
New WordPress Website with Full Range of Content
The first step in the design process is analyzing the full range of content that will be used on the new WordPress website. With that content in mind we design templates for each section of the website that will contain a different type of content. Starting with a pre-built base template and any required plugins, we then integrate the plugins and customize the template for each type of content that will be used to achieve an integrated cohesive overall website design. We achieve this integrated design with custom SCSS/CSS style sheet coding. In the case of this website we designed customized templates for the homepage, physician groups and individual physicians, specialties, a knowledgebase with articles, a blog with posts, service areas, podcasts, document lists, testimonials and contact forms.
Learning Center with Integrated Knowledgebase
One of the largest sections of this particular website would be a learning center with articles for a large number of conditions and treatments. As a result we determined that the best format for this content would be as a full scale knowledgebase. This would provide the functionality for organizing all the varied article content, integrated search features, and the ability to easily update and add new articles when needed. We chose the Echo Knowledge Base for Documents and FAQs plugin due to its features and compatibility with the chosen base theme. We integrated this into the site with custom SCSS/CSS style sheet coding to modify the display of the content and interface to seamlessly match the overall site design.
SCSS/CSS Design for New WordPress Website
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Creating custom CSS style sheets allows us to override the look and design of the base template, plugins and content to create a unique overall integrated design for the new WordPress website. While CSS is very powerful it can also be a bit tedious and error prone to write. SCSS stands for Sassy CSS and is an advanced extension to the CSS syntax or language. SCSS uses SASS which stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets. SCSS/SASS adds variables, mathematical formulas, mixins (reusable blocks of code), hierarchical structuring and more to CSS. The SCSS stylesheet is then run through a pre-processor that compiles it down to regular CSS. So we write the high level SCSS and run it through the pre-processor. We then post the pre-complied low level CSS to the WordPress website to be used by the web browser.
Search Engine Optimization with Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
Having a new WordPress website that is well designed is great. But if nobody can find it then it would be of very limited value. So we implement search engine optimization (SEO) on all the websites we design. We install and configure the most popular WordPress SEO plugin: Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. This plugin dynamically analyzes the page/post content as it is written. It measures and rates the content with a huge battery of SEO tests. Consequently we’re often able to achieve #1 organic search engine ranking results of strategic keywords for your new WordPress website.
We also train the client on how to use the Yoast SEO plugin. This improves the SEO results of any content that they may add in blog posts or new pages. In fact we even tracked down and fixed a few bugs in the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin as outlined in our blog post Hack Fix for Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin.
Google SEO Organic Search Results for New WordPress Website
- Keyword: Orthopedics Clinic Stoneham
- Results: All Top Seven Hits
- Keyword: Orthopedics Clinic MA
- Results: Second Hit after only Mass General
WordPress Security with iThemes Security Plugin
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world by far. Unfortunately that wild popularity also makes WordPress a target for hackers. So we install and configure the highly popular and capable iThemes Security Plugin on all our new WordPress websites. Consequently this enables us to lock down a number of potential vulnerabilities in your new WordPress website. This includes an overall security check, 404 detection, automatically banning users already on blacklists and adding new users attempting to crack the site, file change detection, password strengthening, system & WordPress tweaks and most importantly brute force detection. We install a free SSL certificate so that your site is tagged as secure in the browser. It also encrypts all communication between the site and your users. We also monitor your site’s security as part of our new WordPress website management, maintenance and hosting.
New WordPress Website Hosting & Management
Our new WordPress website projects include one year of WordPress management, maintenance and hosting which is renewable yearly. DreamLight will take care of routine maintenance such as updates of WordPress, plugins and templates. We’ll handle minor updates and additions to your content and SEO. We’ll also take care of dealing with any hosting tech support issues and keep everything running at peak performance. More substantial functional or content additions to the site are always available at additional cost if necessary. So your new WordPress website basically comes with a bundled webmaster.
Let us Design a Modern New WordPress Website for You!
Whether you need a brand new website for your company or you need to update an existing website, DreamLight can deliver. We offer a broad range of web design options. These range from posting your existing content into a pre-built WordPress theme to full blown custom WordPress development. Today’s modern standards often use responsive design because this produces optimum viewing on mobile smart phones, tablets and desktop computers along with SEO search engine optimization. All our options include installing and configuring WordPress along with any needed themes and plugins. We can also handle your website management, ongoing website maintenance, support and WordPress hosting. We can even bring our in-house animation expertise to bear on your project from custom 2D animated sliders to 3D animated videos if needed.
Contact us for more information about a new WordPress website or to explore your specific needs.
