Freelance WordPress developer, designer, consultant and fixer.

Structure and planning

Failing to plan is planning to fail. Websites need to be structured for effective indexing and rankings. If your site is a mess, it won’t be found.

This doesn’t just mean your page URL structure – it means categories, tags, custom post types – everything should be considered.

Get this wrong, and your site can start building topic clusters that rank for the wrong queries.

Structure also takes into account what you put on each page, how this is semantically organised, whether you are using ARIA labels, schema and so on.

In short, you should spend more time planning your website than obsessing over what it looks like.

Design & User experience

There’s a very good chance your website looks fine overall. What most people do not realise is that whilst they endlessly fuss over design, a visitor makes a decision about it in 300 milliseconds.

Overall, you need to look professional and appropriate – anything outside of this is simply cake decoration.

Where you should invest time is in elements of your site, such as calls-to-action, forms, and so on: how do they work, are they obvious, and does the user understand what they need to do?

You will hear the term UX banded around a lot, but real UX needs extensive user testing and at least 5000 unique visitors per month to make any sense of the data – for most business websites, it’s really just a case of using best practices.

Built on a better WordPress theme

Never use an off-the-shelf theme or a page-builder plugin on your website. Firstly, these plugins are designed to do everything for everyone, which makes them bloated and slow.

Secondly, they are usually used by people who do not know how to code – is that what you want for your business’s primary marketing tool?

• Off-the-shelf themes (in general) pump out code soup that AI won’t wade through
• Page builder plugins do the same
• Too much code on your site means getting ranked or cited is more difficult
• Bloated sites load slowly
• Team this up with all the additional plugins you need to install to get the theme to do anything, and you are heading for a webshite

A better WordPress theme is one that starts with virtually nothing and is built around your business objectives. This means you get everything your business needs and nothing it doesn’t.

Custom themes are lean, optimisable and don’t break in six months’ time when you want to add some additional functionality, and when built around the core WordPress Codex, they are as future-proof as they can be.

Business savvy

A website is never just a website; it’s usually part of a wider marketing effort and often needs to integrate with a CRM or communicate with other systems via APIs or automations.

I don’t build a website then disappear – I help with integrating your website into your wider digital communications and business operations.

I have extensive experience with apps that integrate with your website, such as HubSpot, Zapier, API integrations, accounting tools, Replit, Lovable, Claude, Cloudflare, hosting, DNS, email, and so on.

I use this experience to help clients within the wider digital marketing landscape that is now evolving faster than ever due to AI.

A website is not a solo marketing tool – it’s a part of your wider business ecosystem, and this can be integrated, automated and optimised to convert more new business leads into paying customers.