Wordpress Upgrade and Revitalized Design for Law Firm

Nowadays, a pressing question for businesses is not how great a website looks or works, but how well it’s maintained. Scheduling time for server or backend maintenance might sound like a waste of time, but it’s not something you should ignore. If you let it go for too long, it can be a nightmare to untangle a mess of disorganized pages, outdated plugins, and expired content.

Our client, Adishian Law, became overwhelmed with an overflow of data and an unorganized backend for their WordPress site. Keeping a website and network updated is no simple task, especially when managing a business. Even when the clean-up project begins, the entire job can feel daunting. For Adishian, a full-time WordPress development team was the best answer to overcome the existing web and backend data problems.

The good news? Developers have made advances that simplify building and managing content online. And having expert developers with experience helps put new technology and knowledge into practice.

This case is a good example. With a development plan in place, our team of developers set-out to upgrade the website with a major transfer and data restructure, custom page templates, and new design to eliminate the existing data management hurdles and simplify the use for administrators.

Since 2003, Adishian Law has earned local and national traffic on their blog, but their once tidy web data reached overwhelming levels. The time spent adding or editing content was taking longer than it should. Web managers, users, and blog readers felt the negative effects from the data overload.

There were too many internal pages to sort through, too much data to load for a user, and articles too hard to find. Something had to be done, and that’s where Endertech came into the picture.

When transitioning from an old WordPress site to a new one, we start with sourcing the client’s WordPress data into files for restructuring. Transferring data is important and should be handled with care.

If handled incorrectly, it can cause problems in the future. To minimize mistakes and confusion before data is uploaded and reorganized, we must create properly labeled files from the beginning. Here, XML files were the best choice because the plain text format is easy to work with.

If you’re handling a project like this yourself, we recommend using XML for data transfer. This makes it easier to create data that’s easily shared with other applications.

After confirming proper titles and headings with every new data set, data files were uploaded to the new WordPress website. This included items like:

• Case studies

• Testimonials

• Media Files

• Blog Post

By now you’re probably familiar with a database and what it means to upload data, but restructuring data in WordPress is a separate task. Our expert WordPress developers understand the layout of how data is sorted in WordPress, and this is useful when placing web data back together.

Even though WordPress attempts to minimize the level of data that’s created, with years of content to sort through, restructuring all the pages, posts, and custom posts was still a huge metadata project. All the content types, and their attachments, need to be linked to the correct database table in WordPress.

These database tables are merely virtual blocks where specific datasets of WordPress are stored. The database tables separate the different sections and functionalities of a WordPress site. These database tables include sections of your website you may find familiar:

• Comments

• Links

• Options

• Posts

• Users

Understanding how WordPress uses database tables to store its metadata is highly beneficial when placing previous sections in their “proper homes.” Since WordPress data needed to be re-categorized to their correct sections, our expert content developers allowed for a faster data restructuring without setbacks.

The purpose of the project was not only to restructure and upgrade the website, the owner also needed his site to be easy to maintain and grow. For a website that produces content regularly, it was important to create templates to use when adding new pages and posts.

This simplifies the process down to nearly a drag-and-drop method when creating new content for the website. The templates also minimize the possibility of future errors, like mis-categorizing new content, and data creation. Templates help manage data and maintain consistency in the long run.

Websites often communicate with users before they ever read anything on the site. Therefore, our goal was to design a modern, visually appealing website. However, since the client’s website had not been updated in quite a while, we ended up doing a complete overhaul of the design. 

Together with the owner, Endertech web designers worked on developing the entire blueprint of the website, from footers to headers. Beginning with a Photoshop file, WordPress designers began their implementation. The new design includes updated text, fonts, menu items, and a consistent theme structure throughout the website that makes it easy to follow while providing expert knowledge to potential clients.

Now, with the client’s newly transferred and restructured data, pre-developed templates and modern design, there’s no limit to how the site can grow and expand. Bring on the content!. Their team can more easily manage rich content creation that helps optimize brand awareness, expert law input, and increase client leads, without all the icky issues of data management.

Planning your website migration or upgrade, whether WordPress or other content management software should focus on solving existing problems – but also set a path for growth. Your target goals should be discussed with expert developers, which will better direct your vision and result in a superior end-product.