This section outlines some of the key issues involved in specifying the required design of your WordPress blog or web site, to get it up and running and ready for the publication of your all important content. For further, detailed consideration of such issues in this area, please refer to the WP Design postings section here >>   This section doesn't address – in depth – questions of site structure (for example, the definition of static site pages or post categories) or specific requirements of site functionality (what are the particular capabilities of your WordPress site). Please refer to the WP Management section for this >>

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WordPress Blog or WordPress Web Site?

Header Graphic

Required Corporate Style

Required Plug-Ins

Domain Name and Hosting

Unsurprisingly, design is the first – and critical – stage in establishing your WordPress blog or WordPress web site.

Why critical?

Because the design needs to reflect what you want your we site to look like and what you want it to do.

A design can certainly be amended once your site is 'live' and up and running on the Net and a certain degree of change will almost definitely be required in the initial stages, but significant post-launch alterations may lead to:

• significantly extended development timescales and costs
• frustration on the part of the client and the designer – not a great start to any working relationship!

So how to get design as right as possible, first time out?

The very short answer – planning!

OK, but the planning of what?

1) Appearance

WordPress Blog or WordPress Web Site (or both)?

This is a fundamental design decision, impacting not only on the site layout but how the site will work.

If you decide on a web site approach, then the WordPress blogging origins of your site can be disguised – your web site will consist of pages only, rather than posts.

Clients often opt for WordPress to drive a web site due to a combination of its being free Open Source software and its adaptability to serve as a functional content management system (enabling clients to maintain and manage their own site, with the potential convenience and cost benefits that will accrue).

If, however, the decision is taken to use WordPress as a blog, you will have access to all the blogging functionality incorporated within WordPress – for example, pages and posts within categories, a full range of plug-ins and widgets, the opportunity for interactivity with blog visitors, etc., etc.

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The choice of a striking and relevant header graphic for your site is often a good place to start.

The header graphic will have a significant influence on the initial impact your site will have on visitors while also helping in the selection of the principal colours – the palette – to be used in the rest of the design.

We would recommend the iStockphoto.com collection as a great place to research the appropriate header graphic for your WordPress project.

Required Corporate Style

Have you an established offline – or, indeed online – corporate style that you require to be accommodated by the WordPress site design?

By corporate style we mean such design elements as:

• logo
• strapline (e.g. 'Every little helps')
• colours
• font (although there are still significant limitations here in the use of font types compared with the relatively complete freedom enjoyed by the world of print design)
• 'tone' (guidelines, for example, regarding the style of language to be used and the tone or 'voice' to be conveyed, e.g. informal and friendly or authoritative and professional or overtly commercial or participatory (a site for 2-way communication)

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2) Other Considerations

Required Plug-Ins

We recognise we are moving into the area of site functionality here, away from considerations of pure design, but there is good reason to start to addess this issue at this point…

Plug-ins are pieces of software that can be added – plugged in – to a WordPress installation to add to its core capabilities.

It is important, as early as possible, to establish that a site design will effectively accommodate any plug-ins required, to avoid discovering later that the site looks great but doesn't and cannot work as intended.

'Standard' Plug-Ins

There are certain plug-ins that we would recommend installing as standard, such as a replacement WYSIWYG editor for the one that automatically comes with WordPress and plug-ins, for blog sites, that enable the effective ordering of links and categories in widget sidebars, but there are a myriad of other possibilities, depending on what you want your site to do.

Other Plug-Ins

Discussion will be required with the client to establish specific requirements that may require plug-ins and then to identify their availability and suitability and to test them within the proposed design on the development site.

Plug-ins may be related to functions such as:

• search engine optimisation
• online transactions
• image galleries
• membership schemes
• etc., etc.

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Domain Name and Hosting

• increasing the 'brand impact' of your site
• the effect it will have on search engine visibility
• you will probably live with this identity for a long time. You certainly won't want to be continuously renaming your web presence

We can help you with checking the availability of suggested domain names and choosing the correct domain type for your project (e.g. .co.uk, .com, .org.uk, .org, .eu, etc.).

Efficient hosting for your WordPress site needs to be ensured at a relatively early stage. The hosting arrangements will obviously need to support the minimum specification for WordPress installation and operation, but clients will also probably be concerned with other required features, such as:

• reliability (site 'uptime')
• the ability to upgrade
• backup facilities
• the number of e-mail addresses and e-mail features, such as auto-forwarding
• online site statistics
• the availablity and quality of technical support

We would usually recommend that your domain is registered at the same company that will provide the hosting fror your site.

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