Website Design and Consulting Services

Dynamic WordPress Website Design & Building

At TH Design, we develop and build websites in the WordPress platform. It uses PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripting language to dynamically generate display HTML/CSS pages. It has an extensive and growing user base, a massive support database and active support forum.

WordPress has a built-in Content Management System that enables “permitted” users to access the site via any web browser and make page updates and changes. Different levels of permission can be assigned giving some users full ability to make changes and other users more limited access. For companies or organizations that need multiple people to be able to make site updates, WordPress delivers! (Although Content Management Systems have been around for several years, they have typically been very costly to implement and support. WordPress enables companies and organizations to update their web content without needing to make a significant investment in additional software.)

WordPress offers literally thousands of plug-ins that extend site functionality in virtually every direction. With WordPress, it’s possible to sync a client’s Social Media communications channels together with their primary website thereby eliminating a lot of redundant posting, tweeting, etc. And, WordPress makes it possible to incorporate a blog into a company or organization’s website while maintaining consistent visual branding.

We are very excited about all WordPress has to offer as a web development tool and we look forward to harnessing its power to our client’s benefit.

Back to Top

Custom Theme Design

WordPress uses a template structure and there are thousands of templates available, but we found the very best world comes from creating a custom theme and coding it for WordPress. Why?

First of all, during our years in business we’ve never encountered a client who actually wanted to use a template “as is”—clients always want to tweak, change, modify, add and subtract. In other words, clients want a customized solution for their particular wants/needs.

Second, “pre-fab” templates are by their nature limiting. Although most templates build-in a certain amount of “customize-abilty” (in terms of minor color changes and the ability to add logos and header/background images), they can’t be flexible regarding structure. In other words, 2-column templates have to remain 2-column; 3-columns can’t be reduced to two, etc. So, instead of having a layout that suits your content, you have to adjust your content to suit the layout of the template.

At the same time, stock templates are usually “heavy” in the sense that they build in all sorts of functionality (the “one-size-fits-all” approach) in case a user might wish to implement that functionality—which often means servers carry the load of a lot of unnecessary code.

But at the end of our process, a client will have a custom-designed website specifically tailored to their tastes, their brand, their mission and their content. The site will be as “light” as possible, with precisely the functionality it needs. At some future point in time, if a client needs additional functionality, we can add those functions readily without employing excessive or redundant code.

With WordPress, a client can have it both ways—a custom look with the benefits of a solid, dependable, extensible and configurable foundation.

Website Usability

One of our defining web design imperatives is Usability: the principles surrounding the issue of how usable is a website?

• Is it easy or hard for people to find the information they want on a website?
• Do they have trouble figuring out how the website works?
• Can they physically navigate through the website without struggling?
• How long will they wait around for a page to load?
• Do they get lost or stranded or can they always get back to where they were in a site?

Answers to these (and many similar questions) inform our design philosophy in the matter of designing and building websites. Our guiding aesthetic sense is one of elegant simplicity. We want our clients’ sites to look special and customized, but we also want the site to be easy to use, cross-platform and cross-browser compatible, quick to load, and accessible to any and everyone with access to any device capable of displaying a web page. (See the Resources page for links about Usability.)

Back to Top