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Jumpstarting Web Presence in 2021

Lockdown restrictions deliver substantial blows to the concept of offline B2C and force the most digitally-aversive enterprises to shift towards a minimal web presence at very least. Small business owners affected by the pandemic wont argue about making #0F0 a little bit greener: experiencing losses and customer churn, they require a cost effective solution until yesterday and tend to compromise on what can & can’t be delivered within a budget.

Content Matters

In mentioned circumstances the Content First paradigm glances with its ability to deliver fast turnover and filter out uncooperative customers by articulating the decisive role of the actual information to be presented in order to acquire new and address existing clients immediately.

A customized questionnaire reduces the initial awkwardness, collects all basic SEO/meta/keyword dataz and should assess the internal content generation potential of your client, key factor for a realistic content strategy. It is also a great start for further brainstorming, should you be hired for content creation.

Native themes

Official WordPress themes are valuable reference implementations, written according to best practices. The amount of important invisible details (accessibility, security, SEO, etc. ), cross-platform compatibility and edge-case tests that are taken care of is extraordinary.

Every release marks a milestone of WordPress theme development, studying the current one is a traditional way to start learning how its done. Feature requests, speed of (critical) bug fixing and documentation are multiplied by an outstanding support of community hive mind.

Since introduction of Gutenberg blocks the deal breaking default “blog-look” can be purged in no time. Block components decouple layout logic from the theme and should be used in any WordPress configuration. This is especially true for native themes: operating in block abstractions, extended by those provided by plugins enables replication of most sophisticated, feature rich theme layouts.

Will it blend?

“Is the XYZ theme a good one, will it work for me?” this frequent question is oftentimes supplemented with screenshots, live demos, pirated source code and no particular WordPress instance to test on.

Content management systems manage content. In order to reliably check if a theme works for you, some homework needs to be done. By occasion its a necessary condition for the website anyway.

Officially listed themes undergo an automated testing process which gets gradually better over time. A random one from WordPress directory can be expected to replicate own screenshots; future compatibility, widget and edge-case issues reserved.#

Conclusion

No theme can replace an ideal solution built from scratch. On the other hand utilizing current default themes & block components as long as possible is a legit strategy, focused on rapidly deployable, findable websites with authentic quality content. Offering short-term availability, Content-Driven Design also lays solid ground for selection, testing and adoption of any third-party theme in the future.

Avoiding premature optimisation loops along with investing in WordPress (self)training and inhouse generation of unique content are practical money saving tools in clients hands. Sleek custom solutions can be prototyped and tested simultaneously with traffic sources and conversion funnels in an incremental, fail-fast manner.