Is a custom WordPress theme right for my project?

To answer the question of whether a custom or premade theme would best serve your needs, check out our related FAQ.

What is the infrastructure Simpatico uses to build sites?

We use standard WordPress infrastructure to create objects in the content management system that make sense: custom post types, menus, headers, footers, etc. We use Advanced Custom Fields (along with ACF Extended) to create the needed metadata fields. We use ACF to create these fields, and then call them in the page/post template files. We love the tools that both of these frameworks give us for customizing the backend UI so it’s easy for our clients to use.

Backend CMS User Interface

Tell me about how you build the theme itself.

All of our sites start with a starter theme that we’ve developed in-house. Our team is made up of hybrid designer-developer types who are obsessively passionate that the final front-end code matches the visual language of the designs. Our code is clean, commented, and semantic, and we pride ourselves on best development practices. We use media queries to adapt the CSS for different breakpoints (as makes sense in the design) so your website adapts gracefully and looks beautiful on all device sizes, but we tend to stay away from CSS frameworks and preprocessors to avoid unnecessary code bloat. We use CSS and jQuery (one of the most popular Javascript libraries) for animations and interactivity.

How do you ensure clients have the ability to create their own content, without needing to bring in a developer for everything?

Read more about how we embrace modular web design in Modular Web Design: A Simpatico Q&A.

Studio Simpatico team hold SEO signs

What about SEO?

We install Yoast to make sure all the necessary tags and technical SEO necessities are in place. Though we are not an SEO shop, I typically describe us as “SEO aware,” since we do build SEO strategy and tactics into much of our process. Learn more about what we do and don’t do here.

What about hosting?

We develop sites on our own internal staging environment on WP Engine. (We’re a WP Engine partner.) When the site is ready for QA, you’ll be uploading content and QAing it on this staging environment. When the build is ready, we can transfer our environment to the host of your choice. We don’t provide hosting services to our clients, but we do recommend WP Engine in most circumstances.