How to speed up development time of wordpress sites?

  • We are a web agency that build WordPress sites for our clients.
    We don’t use templates as we are known for bespoke custom designs. We mock up a number of pages in Photoshop first.
    Typical sites are brochure style, 10 – 15 pages using 3 – 4 page styles. We lay out all the content for our clients & ensure the sites work well across mobiles.

    The issue we face is these sites are taking a long time to develop typically 60 – 100 hours. Does anyone have any suggestions for how we can bring this dev time down?
    It seems high for what is a CMS driven brochure site. Secondly does anyone have any benchmarks for how WP sites using custom design should take? Difficult I know…

    Any tip or suggestion will be highly appreciated.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    So .. it takes under 2 weeks to make your custom idea, which is made specifically for some, to go from idea to done? That’s not slow at all!

    That said, you could probably speed things up with a theme framework to build your bespoke designs off of. After all, a bespoke suit still uses the suit pattern ??

    I’ll second the framework suggestion. We started using Foundation (https://foundation.zurb.com/) at my office, and cut custom theme development time in half. You can either start from scratch with the framework, which already has a responsive grid and lots of styling, or use one of the starter themes listed on this page:

    https://foundation.zurb.com/develop/tools.html

    Another framework that we’ve used successfully is Bootstrap:

    https://getbootstrap.com/

    It also really helps to use a CSS pre-processor such as LESS or Sass, each of which is used in one of the above frameworks.

    Thread Starter Vito.Alidon

    (@vitoalidon)

    Thanks for the responses, very insightful. ??

    I just have an additional enquiry relating to my question.

    What if we give a lot of weight in custom designs, and don’t exactly want to limit the designers’ creativity to certain template grids, maybe there’s a specific framework for that, or is said framework still okay to use?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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