We recently worked with long-time client Speech Language and Learning to give their WordPress website a much needed refresh by installing a new theme on their existing site.
BeKonstructive Marketing have been working with Speech Language and Learning since day one.
Speech Language and Learning were actually our first ever non-agency client. Bek met the owner of the business, Sue, while she was still at university studying her Masters degree and doing some freelance work on the side.
When we first started working with Speech Language and Learning 5 years ago, it was to help them build their first website. The site was built on WordPress using a template but it also involved a lot of graphic work which was a bit of a learning curve for us at the time! We were pretty proud of the original website back then but it hadn’t aged will over the past few years. Not only has our skill level evolved significantly but Google has also made a lot of big changes to what it considers ‘best practice’ and Sue’s website was no longer meeting a lot of the base lines for things like security, site speed or mobile performance.
Website Refresh:
When Sue got in touch with BeKonstructive recently to look at updating her site, we were pretty excited. Originally, the project was just meant to look at on-page updates – Sue had a lot of new photographs that she’d had taken along with some new content that she want loaded onto the website.
However, when we started to make the changes we quickly discovered that the template we’d built her site on was very out of date. The creators of the template had stopped updating it in 2016, so a lot of the features weren’t supported by the most recent version of WordPress and the Gutenberg Editor.
This posed us a bit of a problem because it made loading and formatting content to the website a lot more difficult and time-consuming as a lot of the plugins and shortcode that the template relied on either didn’t work anymore or were full of bugs.
But more importantly, the outdated theme exposed Sue’s website to security risks. Majority of updates to themes, plugins and WordPress software are actually to fix bugs and patch security ‘holes’, not to give you access to new features or functionalities. That is why it is so important to ensure that you are logging into your website regularly to make sure that your themes and plugins are all up to date.
After speak to Sue about her outdated template, we decided to purchase and install a new template on her website. We recommended Salient, a theme that we have found to be fast loading, flexible and reliable. The new theme was a great opportunity to give Sue’s website an entire make-over. Suddenly we weren’t just loading new page content, we were also looking at restyling her site, making it more sleek and modern.
Sue had a few requests – that we keep the hexagon motif and the bright colour scheme – but otherwise she gave us a lot of creative freedom over the website refresh project.
We started the project by selecting the colour pallet – we wanted to phase out the bright blue from Sue’s original website because it is not a particularly web-friendly colour and can be difficult to see on some screens. Sue had send us a whole lot of new photos of her team in which they are wearing new uniforms that were a nice deep shade of teal. So we replaced the bright blue with a shade of teal that matched their uniforms, which complimented the pinks and purples from her original website.
Next we found a nice graphic background that fit with the colour pallet of teal, pink and purple and also incorporated the hexagon theme – this was a bit of a jackpot image that we stumbled across on a stock image website and we probably couldn’t have asked for a better or more suitable image so we were pretty happy about that!
The rest of the site really falls back on the theme’s templates and capabilities – we chose layouts that suited the content nicely and for longer pages we used accordions and toggles to help format all of the text without making the pages super long.
We’re really happy with how the website has come out and we believe the end result is a great product for the client. Visually, the website looks brand new, but we were able to save our client a lot of money by installing a new theme rather than building a whole new website.
Check out Sue’s upgraded website here, or get in touch with us to discuss a website refresh with a new theme for your own business.
