Wordpress Development

Cornerstone Digital has been designing and developing websites for both the Calgary market and beyond, since 2005. Over the years, we’ve built hundreds of Wordpress powered websites, dozens of web apps, and dozens of online stores, empowering companies to use the internet effectively to further their business goals. Building from scratch, upgrading your current site, or need to integrate with other solutions? No challenge is too big or small!

Our WordPress Services

We have experience building hundreds of WordPress sites and provide end-to-end service, covering all of your needs in designing, developing, and maintaining your website . Our services include:

WordPress Design – Our designers will work with you to design a beautiful, functional, and easy-to-use website design. The design will reflect your existing brand style and guidelines.
WordPress Development – We will build out your site in WordPress, configuring WordPress, implementing your design, and importing all content. We’ll also ensure that it works properly across devices and browser, including all of the most popular mobile, tablet and computer browsers.
Functionality Implementation – For any functionality which is not standard in WordPress, we will either source plugins which provide this functionality or will build custom plugins, as required.
Quality Assurance – We run every website though our 52 point checklist, ensuring that your site is of the highest quality and works exactly as you intended.
Maintenance and Support – Our friendly support team is available to answer all of your questions and make updates and fixes to your website as needed. If you run into any problems, we’re always just a phone call away.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily keep your website content up-to-date without needing to know anything about coding or programming. It also provides a wide range of functionality, allowing your website to interact with your audience, manage online communities, and even sell products online.

Worldwide, WordPress is the most popular content management system, powering over 40% of all websites. It’s popularity is due to it’s easy of use, customization for most any needs, and it is open source, so there are no licensing costs (it’s essentially free, other than ongoing hosting and maintenance costs).

There are currently over 455,000,000 websites powered by WordPress.

WordPress is ideal for small to medium sized organizations looking for a an easy-to-use CMS solution that will grow with them.

Strengths

Very easy to use
It’s completely customizable. You can easily change the look of your website using one of the thousands or available themes, or custom build one to your exact specifications.
Functionality is easily expanded – WordPress has over 50,000 plugins available, allowing you to easily add to your website’s functionality.
There’s a very large and active open source community, offering support and updates. There are also an enormous number of forums, tutorials, and videos available where you can learn everything about WordPress.
WordPress is a very cost effective solution as it’s essentially free, other then hosting and maintenance costs.

Weaknesses

There’s a slight learning curve. But most CMS systems have a learning curve, so WordPress is not more difficult than most. But if you’re just building a very simple and small website, there are easier CMS systems to use.
It’s not as scalable as enterprise level platforms. This isn’t an issue for most websites, but if you’re building a wide ranging site like the Huffington Post or a site which receives huge volumes of traffic like espn.com, then it may limit you.
It can be difficult to keep updated, if you use too many plugins. Updating is necessary as security patches are routinely issued to protect your site from hackers. However, these updates often break plugins, so you’ll need to have an experienced developer keep your site updated.
Being the most popular CMS, it’s also often the target of hackers.

Technical Specifications

Open source built in PHP and MySQL.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress the best CMS?
WordPress is an excellent solution for most websites and is one of the leading CMS platforms as a result – it powers over 40% of all websites worldwide. However, there are a number of other solutions which are also great, so it really depends on your needs. If you’re unsure, get in touch and we can help you to decide which is the best solution for you.

Is WordPress free?
Yes, WordPress is free. It’s open source, so there’s no cost to buy it nor any annual license fees. However, that doesn’t mean your WordPress website won’t cost you anything – you will need to pay to host it somewhere and should also budget for ongoing maintenance and updates (as WordPress regularly issues security updates which you’ll need to get a developer to implement for you).

Does WordPress support different languages?
Yes, the customer-facing part of your website can be built out to communicates in whatever language(s) you want. The WordPress software itself (which you’ll see when you manage and update your site) is also available in a wide range of languages – 169 at last count!

Does WordPress require coding?
No, not to maintain and update your website. But the initial implementation of WordPress usually does require some coding, so it’s best in find a developer to help you with the initial set-up and support you, in case you run into trouble at any time.

Is WordPress SEO friendly?
Yes, WordPress is SEO friendly. There are also a number of different SEO plugins available which will ensure that your site is properly optimized for Google and other search engines.

Is WordPress just for blogging?
WordPress did start out as a blogging platform, but has developed well beyond that and is now considered one of the top content management platforms, suitable for a wide range of uses. Worpress can easily power your blog, corporate website, online community, and online store.

Can WordPress manage my online store?
Yes, WordPress can provide full online store capabilities using plugins. WooCommerce is currently the most popular ecommerce plugin and provides all of the functionality needed for most online stores. However, there are lots of other options and specialized plugins for just certain uses, such as Easy Digital Downloads for selling digital products and Member Press for selling subscription based digital products.

Is there a hosted version of WordPress?
Yes, WordPress offers a hosted version at wordpress.com. It’s easy to get up and running (no programming required) and starting at just $5/month, it’s very cost effective as well. The basic packages do not include the ability to install plugins nor custom themes – the Business plan ($33/month) is needed if you’re going to that functionality.

Can I customize the look of my website or do I have to use a template?
The look of your site is determined by a template, so every WordPress site must use a template. There are tens of thousands of templates already available, so that you don’t have to start from scratch, which can save a lot of time and effort. Templates can provide a good starting point for a website and can be customized as needed. However, not all templates are great – we’ve found that many are not well coded which can constrain what you can do with your site down the road and can also hinder the performance of your website, so it’s important to choose a template carefully. We’ve developed our own templates which are optimized for flexibilty and site performance and use these as the foundation for most of our WordPress sites.

Can I import the content from my existing website?
Yes, generally you can. There are programs that will extract the content from your existing website and import it into WordPress.

Can I use my existing domain name with WordPress?
Yes, you can point your existing domain name at your WordPress site, instantly moving it so that there’s no interruption of service for your customers.

Read more about our other Website Design & Development platforms: Craft, Drupal, Hubspot, Silver Stripe, Expression Engine, and PHP.