WordPress web design

a love, hate relationship

Don’t get me wrong, I love using WordPress to develop websites but I have to admit that it hasn’t been without very frustrating challenges at times that I had to overcome. For the first few years, I’ve had to struggle with free plugins and themes which later on were exchanged for “premium” themes (often bloated) and slow which made optimizing for page speed an absolute nightmare.

Over the years, I’ve experimented and found a workflow that enables me to produce really fast 100% unique and secure WordPress websites. All my new works are produced using the same theme and mostly the same set of premium plugins. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into learning and licencing for a hand-picked selection of plugins for which I own developer licences.

Custom fields and post types

These days I tend to build bespoke websites for clients and will in some cases implement these advanced features in WordPress to achieve specialist goals. In most cases I try and hard code these settings into a child theme to optimize for speed and minimize the risk of plugin incompatibilities.

Some plugins I own developer licences for

Elementor Pro
301 Redirect pro
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
Elementor Extras
BD themes – Elements KIT
Dynamic.ooo – Dynamic content for Elementor
Permalink Manager Pro
Advanced Database Cleaner
301 Redirect Pro

There are others which I pay for on annual subscriptions but I’ve added this list to demonstrate that I value high-quality products, and I’m willing to invest in products that streamline my workflow and increase the quality of the websites I produce.

Child themes

I fully understand the importance of developing child themes for every project as it helps future-proof the websites I build. This is to ensure any custom post types and custom fields are hard coded into the child theme to enable the removal of any plugins used to get the development off the ground.

Git

johan.koke.estate > Git

While I may not use GIT on a daily basis as I’ve never really had any real need to place a whole WordPress site in a git repository, I’m familiar enough with the technology and occasionally use it for personal projects like bash scripts and docker-compose files to make deploying new sites easy and fast.

MySQL

johan.koke.estate > MySQL

From cleaning up redundant data or migrating websites connected to MySQL databases, I’ve got skills to perform manual backups and migrations without using 3rd party tools like PHPMyAdmin.

Graphic design

johan.koke.estate > Graphic design

The software i’m mostly used to at present are the design suite from Affinity Software. Although I’ve used Adobe products in the past and have a firm grasp on good design principles and different file types software produce.

Linux

johan.koke.estate > Linux

I feel very comfortable configuring a Debian based Linux server and setting up a secure firewall with VPN access to make hacking it virtually impossible