This site was a straight transfer of an HTML site made in Dreamweaver and put onto WordPress (yes, it’s possible!). Originally the goal was to SEO the site for a new Vancouver Tutoring Company who wanted to rank well on Search Engines. After analyzing the former site, it was agreed that while the look and design was doing ok and serving it’s purpose, the site would benefit greatly by being on WordPress. Not only would this add the functionality of an incorporated blog, which could provide fresh content for search engines, it would also allow the company to grow into a site instead of growing out of a site. It was clear that the owner had goals to grow the functionality and presence of the web site into something more than an information resource. WordPress, with its many plugins and frequent updates, would stay current and be available to accommodate company changes in the future. A plain HTML site however, would only present more and more limitations down the road.
But of course, with the goal to improve Search Engine Optimization, this site was built with ranking in view. Titles of pages, permalink settings, urls, meta descriptions, header tags, sitemaps, indexation customization, and so on were addressed and also became much easier for a non-developer to change and add on in the future. The home page slider used to be occupied by a static image with text locked inside of it. Now the slider features actual text and a title that can be read by Google. Even better, all images are not only easily editable within WordPress (a great feature to have on the user-side experience), they also come with easy-to-insert Alternate Text, Title and Description fields. This will further help optimize the site down the road.
Since this site was taken from an HTML beginning, it did come with it’s challenges where custom sidebars and widgets came in. We did do a lot of custom work on the widgets by using the Widget Logic plugin in combination with WordPress conditional tags. In addition, we had to use specific page classes in the Child Theme CSS file to get certain pages (like the “About the Owner) page to have different colour backgrounds or borders. This way, the client does not have to worry about taking care of esthetics and can simply make edits to content with the assurance the page will appear exactly as it was on the former HTML site (which was a requirement for this project).
Below are some screenshots of the new site built into WordPress!
The new blog page:
The Tutoring Inside Page Design with Custom Widget Designs
A Full-Width Page
Custom Page Style using CSS
