WordPress Web Design & Development

WordPress is the World’s largest and most successful Open Source Content Management System, powering over 40% of the web.

Pooka & Co has more than a decade of experience delivering beautiful and bespoke WordPress websites on time and budget for a wide range of clients.

Our Edinburgh based WordPress agency has the experience and expertise to explore and define your brand and goals, connect the technologies that your website requires, and craft your unique web presence.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is at the core of millions of websites around the world, because of its ease of use, its extreme adaptability and its low ongoing costs – WordPress itself is actually free!

WordPress can exist at the core of almost any type of website, from small but beautiful brochure sites, to extensive customer relationship management systems. From simple to complex eCommerce capabilities, to membership and mapping systems, and far beyond.

At Pooka & Co, we focus on website design and development projects costing between £5,000 and £50,000. Our co-Directors manage every Pooka & Co project personally, and commit code and design to every site that we build. Our friendly, open and hands-on approach grows strong client relationships, and we’ll hope to support the website that we build for you for many years to come.

Designing With Blocks

WordPress comes with an incredibly powerful block editor, offering website owners a huge amount of freedom to move ‘blocks’ of content around a website, a lot like stacking Lego blocks. One day you might place a video at the top of your homepage, the next day you might choose to create links to an important new story or campaign.

During the design phase of a Pooka & Co web project, we’ll define what the ‘blocks’ of your website are, and what they’ll do. We’ll show you how simple blocks like ‘headings’ or ‘paragraphs’ will look on your website, and we’ll discuss more complex needs, such as displaying key pieces of data attractively, or adding something like a ‘download block’ to encourage visitors to download a pamphlet or annual report.

Pooka & Co projects can encompass brand identity and even print work depending on your needs. We offer in-house design services, but we are also happy to work with your existing brand team. Our open approach ensures that you can leverage the most appropriate balance of technical and design skills to deliver your unique project.

Accessibility, Responsive Design & SEO

Pooka & Co pride ourselves on approaching web design, development and training with Accessibility, Responsive Design and SEO at the forefront of our minds. We always build to WCAG 2.1 AA standards as a minimum, ensuring that our sites (whether public sector or not) meet the accessibility standards required by law, and so can be used by as many people as possible.

Our websites are always ‘Responsively Designed’ meaning pages will display well on different screen sizes, from mobile phone sizes upwards. In fact, we typically design ‘Mobile First’ as the majority of websites receive more visitors using mobile than desktop devices. And from the earliest stage of a project with us, we’ll go to great effort to understand your business and your goals, to co-develop a site navigation that is intuitive, but also expandable in the long-term.

Designing great websites, coding them semantically and hosting them within a highly optimised server environment results in a great experience for the end user and also for SEO. Google go to great lengths these days to factor in user experience metrics, so it’s vital that we factor in how Search Engines will index your website content from day one, to help ensure your site the reach that it deserves.

“Pooka's creative flair ensures that design and functionality meet the brief perfectly, putting the client's ideas at the centre of the project and taking the stress out of what is for most people a daunting technical process.”

John Saich

Music Producer & Arts Consultant

Expandability

WordPress has a huge library of ‘Plugins’ which are dedicated pieces of software that can be installed into your site, to achieve specific functionality. Some are large and powerful like the WooCommerce eCommerce platform. Some are small and less useful, like the Worthless plugin.

The power of WordPress plugins can be used to add incredible website capabilities with very reasonable costs, but it’s power that must be used cautiously. Every additional plugin on a site has the potential to decrease site speed, increase the likelihood of security vulnerabilities, and even cause remedial work if a plugin is abandoned by its developer.

Pooka & Co will use our years of experience to judge whether to use plugins to fulfill your needs, or to code functionality directly into the bespoke WordPress ‘Theme’. We believe that our considered and flexible approach will provide the best balance of security, speed and efficiency possible, whatever your budget.

Open Source and Beyond

Putting WordPress at the core of a website avoids reinventing the wheel or recreating functionality needed by almost every website, such as deciding which users can create or edit pages vs which users can publish those pages. The myriad of capabilities that WordPress offers out of the box are available freely thanks to the software being ‘Open Source’ and it being actively written and maintained by a global community of developers.

Pooka & Co are deeply motivated by this global Open Source community. We’ve been heavily involved in the organisation of Edinburgh’s own WordPress and WordCamp events, as well as WordCamp Europe, and keep regular contact with key plugin, hosting and other software developers beyond our own team.

Building a site with Pooka & Co means taking the very best of what the open source community has to offer, and adding bespoke design and code to enable your website to do exactly what you need. At the point your website goes live, you’ll become the owner of the code we’ve written for you (even though we’ll be hosting your site), and should you ever wish to move to another agency, we’ll to help you do that. (Though we hope that never happens!)

Hosting, Training & Support

Designing, developing and launching a great website is just the beginning. Pooka & Co manage all of our clients’ website hosting, keeping their sites constantly available, quick to load, secure, backed-up and error free. From great value shared hosting environments, to dedicated and scalable Cloud hosting packages, we’ll take care of WordPress and plugin updates, content backups, uptime monitoring, firewalls, reporting, SSL security certificates and more, leaving you simply to think about your content.

At Pooka & Co, we believe the success of any website relies on excellent training. With each new site we build, our Directors provide direct one-to-one training, and produce a unique series of bespoke training videos that live within that site’s WordPress dashboard for future reference. We also provide every hosted client access to our extensive and ever-evolving library of Pooka & Co WordPress training videos, plus CiviCRM and WooCommerce if helpful.

The best websites are always growing, so Pooka & Co’s Directors make sure we’re always available to talk about your plans and help you achieve them. We never charge you for those quick five minute queries that come up, and for larger work we offer a variety of Ongoing Support options: Pay-as-you-go at our standard hourly rates, reduced rate blocks of 24 hours support valid for a year, and mini-project quotes for larger pieces of design and development.

What Can’t WordPress Do?

In short, not much. WordPress is an excellent platform for the majority of websites, and with the right development team it can achieve almost anything. At Pooka & Co, we’re well accustomed with building sites that can serve from just tens of people per day, to hundreds of thousands. We use WordPress to build anything from attractive brochure sites, to sites with multiple languages, shops and CRM systems, and even multisite networks that allow editors to log into WordPress once, and then edit a whole suite of different websites.

Whether it’s eCommerce, Membership platforms, or providing a solid WordPress backend and an ultrafast JavaScript frontend, WordPress and Pooka & Co has you covered. And in the rare case that we think there’ll be a more cost-effective alternative, we’ll be happy to advise you of this and steer you in the right direction.