WordPress Design and Development

Many business owners find out the hard way that many "Website Designers" simply purchase commercial WordPress themes, install them and put a logo at the top and call it a day, often after paying full price to have a custom designed Website.

The problem is, not all WordPress themes are created equal.  

• Many themes lack flexibility or suffer from poor coding, making what should be a small change, like creating additional menu items, a frustrating and time consuming experience.  
• Themes purchased from popular download sites have been sold to hundreds or thousands of other businesses, maybe even your competitor.
• They often have links to the theme author's site or the site they were purchased from that can't be removed.
• Some themes contain spam links or other malicious code that can't be removed.
• Worst of all, there is a market for stolen themes.  A designer builds a theme, someone buys it, and sells it over and over, giving no credit back to the original author.  How would you feel if someone stole your work?

Since Wordpress is so popular, it is a common target for cyber attacks.  It isn't that Wordpress is particularly vulnerable, but left unpatched and unmaintained, any software can be exploited.  It doesn't even need to be a well-known site, as these attacks are mostly automated, looking for out-dated plugins and insecure logins.  And they hit you where it really hurts, embarrassing your business with inappropriate images and links, or worse, infecting your visitors computers when they visit your site.  It may be more important to keep your Website updated that even your computers. 

While no security is perfect, the first step to securing your WordPress site is to have a reliable and recent backup.  A quality hosting company ( like us ) will have an automated backup already in place.  However, these can be limited and only store a given backup for a few days.  If your site was hacked, malicious code may be included in your backup, making it useless to you.  

Our WordPress Maintenance Package includes:

1. Before starting, we make a thorough backup of the site's files and databases. This backup includes a full database export and download of all files on the server, and are stored offline, ensuring no matter what, your site can be recoved fully.
2. We apply the updates one at a time, clearing the cache to ensure each update applies correctly.
3. If updating a plugin causes an error, we research the error to determine if there are any known issues and available fixes.  
4. We will notify you of any additional work to apply any fixes prior to you ensuring any additional expenses.
5. After all the updates are applied and the cache cleared one final time, we check the basic functionality of the site to ensure the site still works properly.
6. Once complete, we perform a final backup.

WordPress Security:

1. All security starts with strong passwords. We use our password generator for all passwords we create on your system.
2. We remove the WordPress generator tag from your site, which tells attackers whether your site is out dated and vulnerable.
3. We disable commenting sensibly, so you can continue to receive comments on blogs, but reduce the opportunity for attackers to abuse your comment system.
4. When SSL is available, we route all of your Website traffic to the encrypted version of your site.
5. We never store PII ( Personally Identifiable Information ) or credit card numbers on your site.  If you must accept payment, we've developed systems to safely handle credit card and customer information.