Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between custom theme development and theme customisation?

Custom theme development involves creating a completely new WordPress theme from scratch, tailored specifically to your requirements and brand identity. This process typically takes 6-10 weeks and includes designing the layout, creating all template files, implementing custom functionality, and ensuring the theme meets your exact specifications. Custom themes offer unlimited flexibility but require a larger investment of time and resources. Theme customisation, on the other hand, involves modifying an existing theme to better suit your needs. This might include changing colours, fonts, layouts, adding custom features, or removing unwanted elements. Customisation is typically faster and more cost-effective, usually completed within 2-4 weeks depending on the extent of modifications required. The choice between custom development and customisation depends on your budget, timeline, and how closely existing themes match your vision. We’ll assess your requirements during our consultation to recommend the most appropriate approach for your project.

Will my theme be mobile-responsive and SEO-optimised?

Absolutely, every theme we develop or customise is built with mobile-first responsive design principles, ensuring optimal display and functionality across all devices and screen sizes. We test extensively on various devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers to guarantee consistent user experiences. Our responsive approach goes beyond simple layout adaptation – we optimise touch interactions, adjust content hierarchy for smaller screens, and ensure fast loading times on mobile networks. SEO optimisation is built into every theme from the ground up. This includes clean HTML structure, proper heading hierarchy, optimised image handling, fast loading speeds, and schema markup integration where appropriate. We ensure themes generate SEO-friendly URLs, support meta descriptions and titles, and integrate seamlessly with popular SEO plugins like Yoast and RankMath. Additionally, our themes meet Google’s Core Web Vitals requirements, including Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift metrics, which are crucial ranking factors in search results.

Can you work with my existing brand guidelines and design assets?

Yes, we excel at translating existing brand guidelines into compelling WordPress themes that maintain brand consistency across all touchpoints. Our design team works closely with your brand assets including logos, colour palettes, typography guidelines, imagery styles, and tone of voice to ensure seamless brand integration. We can incorporate existing design elements such as icons, patterns, and graphic styles into your theme, creating a cohesive digital experience that reinforces your brand identity. If you have design mockups or wireframes from previous projects, we can adapt these into fully functional WordPress themes whilst ensuring they meet modern web standards and accessibility requirements. We also provide guidance on how your existing brand elements can be optimised for digital use, such as suggesting colour variations for better screen readability or recommending web-safe font alternatives that maintain your brand’s typographic character. Throughout the development process, we ensure every design decision aligns with your brand guidelines whilst enhancing user experience and website functionality. Our goal is to create a theme that feels authentically representative of your brand whilst delivering optimal performance and usability.

How do you ensure theme updates won’t break my customisations?

We implement several strategies to protect your customisations from being overwritten during theme updates, with child themes being our primary approach for most projects. Child themes inherit functionality from parent themes whilst allowing us to make customisations that remain intact when the parent theme is updated. For extensive modifications, we create comprehensive documentation detailing all customisations made, enabling easy reapplication if needed. When developing completely custom themes, we maintain full control over the update process, providing you with update notifications and testing new versions thoroughly before deployment. We also utilise WordPress hooks and filters wherever possible instead of directly modifying core theme files, ensuring customisations remain functional across updates. For sites requiring frequent theme updates, we establish staging environments where updates are tested before going live, allowing us to identify and resolve any conflicts before they affect your live website. Additionally, we maintain regular backups of your website before any update process, providing a safety net should any issues arise. Our ongoing maintenance packages include update management services, where we handle theme updates professionally, ensuring your customisations remain intact whilst keeping your website secure and up-to-date with the latest features and security patches.