Custom WordPress Development

We love building websites with WordPress for many reasons. The main reason is it’s user-friendliness so we can give our clients the ability to easily edit the content of their website. Over the years we have continually developed ways to add more functionality to websites while extending the user-friendliness of WordPress.

Developing with WordPress

Creating complex features to add to a website’s functionality, while keeping the features user-friendly, has always been our main focus when developing with WordPress. WordPress is a user-friendly CMS so any tools and features you add to it need to be user-friendly as well. We utilize Custom Post Types functionality to create features that allow for easy information input and beautifully designed output for that information. We also take advantage of our favourite plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields to extend functionality and WooCommerce for E-commerce.

Custom Post Types

Custom Post Types act in the same ways as Posts do only they are used for a specific reason/topic and not for the general blog use. Combined with the power of Advanced Custom Fields, we use Custom Post Types so clients can easily input information, and then have that information displayed nicely in a customized page template. We have used this in the past for clients to display employees, areas of service, business locations, events, and more!

Visit KiHealthConcepts and check out the find practitioners page. This is a great example of how to use Custom Post Types and allow for easy information input and a beautiful layout for the output. The find locations page is another example of this functionality which takes the location information and plots it onto an embeded Google map!

Events

As mentioned above, we create events system using Custom Post Types. Using a Custom Post Type and Advanced Custom Fields allows us to create events systems that are customized to fit the client’s needs. It also allows us to display the events in any layout and design that we or the client chooses.

Visit Learning Like Champions and check out the events page. This page has two different ways to view the upcoming events. The list view is a typical output of posts, displaying the event date, title, location, description and link to the single event page. The calendar view utilizes FullCalendar, a great jQuery framework for displaying a calendar with events plotted using JSON data. We are able to integrate the events posts to automatically plot on the calendar. Pretty neat!

Custom Page Templates

The WordPress content editor allows for easy content input and output for any WordPress user. But it is very basic and doesn’t allow for much customization to control how the information is outputted on a page. Using Advanced Custom Fields we create custom page templates that alters the WordPress page editor and the layout/design of how the content is displayed to website users. Doing this allows us creative freedom during the design process since we aren’t limited by how the content is inputted into WordPress and then displayed.

Visit Lancaster, Brooks & Welch to see great examples of custom page templates that utilize Advanced Custom Fields and Custom Post Types. Check out the Lawyers page for a great example of a Custom Post Type, and look at an individual Lawyer’s page to see a custom page template that uses all content from the Custom Post Type of that lawyer.

E-commerce

We use WooCommerce and it’s various plugins to create an E-commerce platform for clients. The basic functionality of WooCommerce allows for easy product input and display. Over the years we have developed websites with E-commerce functionality and extended the basic functionality into extra services such as: on page payment methods, packaging and shipping, restricted product access, and more!

Visit Coin Stamp Supplies for a great example of a larger scale E-commerce website using WooCommerce and other related plugins to run an online store.