6 pillars of Moove’s WordPress development

We believe that our passion for our work comes through in every website that we create. Unique designs, attention to detail and a client-centred approach underpin everything we do at Moove. Since we truly enjoy what we do and take pride in our work, we would like to give you an insight into how we approach WordPress development at Moove.

So let’s dive straight into our ‘6 pillars of Moove’s WordPress development’ that represent the backbone of our WordPress development services:

Experienced developers

Our experienced web development team can guide our clients to the best solution and make suggestions about the optimum approach.

All of our developers are specialists in WordPress development, which means that they work with WordPress (and WordPress only) for 8 hours a day, every day, in an expert team of WordPress developers. Phew — that’s a lot of WordPress! This accelerates their understanding and knowledge of how to use the software. Believe us, they know WordPress inside-out!

What does this mean for you? It means faster delivery and better-optimised code, from the latest and best standards in WordPress development.

Quality assurance guidelines

Mooving right along, you probably already know that we have strict guidelines about every step of the website development process. This guarantees consistency and high-quality delivery, every single time. Nothing slips through the cracks!

Our guidelines include compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, browser and mobile testing, security guidelines and best development practice.

The integrity of our clients’ websites is incredibly important to us. Read about how we protect them in our blog post 5 basic security tips for protecting your WordPress website.

We’ve built up our guidelines over time. They come from studying what’s happening in the industry and, more importantly, from understanding what has worked for us over the past 4 years. That’s why we’re able to give you sites that aren’t just fast and secure, but extremely well optimised for search engines such as Google.

Vigorous testing

At Moove, we test everything and we test all the time.

Developer testing

Once we’ve finished a new website and before showing the client, our developer tests the entire site using our Testing Matrix. We see how the site works on multiple browsers under various operating systems, on tablets and mobile devices. The sites we develop are made to be used on the latest versions of every browser and operating system, no matter what the device, and also, wherever possible, to be backwards-compatible with older browser software and systems.

Quality Assurance testing

Every website we develop is vigorously tested by our expert team of QA testers. They test multiple devices and browsers ensuring that everything has been thoroughly tested before it goes live.

Account Manager testing

Once that’s done,  our Account Managers test the entire website against the project brief once again to ensure 100% delivery.

Technical tools

Moove’s in-house set of scripts and snippets

Creating WordPress-only websites allows us to focus our in-house tools on making development faster, more precise and extremely secure. Our developers have built up a library of scripts and snippets that they use in development whenever we start the creation of a new website.

We constantly refine the scripts, working on them and tailoring them to each client’s bespoke requirements. This enables us to develop new sites quickly and error-free. Why do we go to so much trouble? Because we care; we want to do a fantastic job and because we enjoy what we’re doing. (Getting lots of lovely praise from our clients after project completion is pretty sweet, too).

Testing, staging and production server

We use three servers in our site development process to ensure bug-free releases: a Testing, Staging and Production (Live) server. The Testing server allows our developers to come up with new features and test their performance. Once they hit 100% on our quality assurance tests, we roll them out to the Staging server (which is an exact copy of the Production server) and test them further. Once the client gives their approval, we release the new features into the world on the Production (Live) server. We use the web-based hosting service GitHub, which allows us to quickly and easily roll out features from one server to the other once they are approved or tested.

Soft-launch and launch stage

An important part of the development process is our Soft-launch stage. It’s an extra week dedicated to launching a new website before we really launch it. The development is all finished, so the soft-launch gives us the chance to do a series of last tests before going live. Why do we do this? To ensure that the client’s hosting server can handle the incoming traffic and that everything works as it should. Kicking the tyres, you might say.

We only turn off the maintenance regime and launch the website once every check has been successfully passed and the client gives us the thumbs-up. This extra week gives our clients a stress-free and smooth launch of their new website. After that? It’s champagne and oysters time (for a day or two) and then we’re off working hard again on the next release!

Project and account management

We have a very strong and experienced Account and Project Management team at Moove. We think that our Account Managers are particularly important for all the positive feedback we get from our clients. What do our Account Managers do? Here’s a quick list:

• They prepare detailed project plans before the start of each project, review milestones and deadlines with clients and production teams daily.
• They identify 3 milestones every week that our production team have to reach. This ensures that any challenges or difficulties get identified early on and are dealt with very quickly (by, for example, adding extra resources to the project).
• They work in weekly cycles (scrums) and hold short, progress update meetings with our clients regularly.
• They provide day-to-day support to our clients and respond to all queries within the same working day.
• They send our clients weekly reports with a list of the activities, tasks and progress made over the past week, along with a list of tasks for the following week. That way our clients can always keep up to date with the project.
• They use Basecamp – an online collaborative tool – to keep the client’s feedback on our work in one place, easy-to-access and refer back to.
• Training. What would be the point of delivering the most kick-ass website ever, if our client doesn’t know how to handle it? Our account managers give them full training on how to update their site’s content using the new CMS. The training takes place face to face, lasts for around two hours and includes suggestions and recommendations for best security practice.

Constant evaluation and improvement

Technology is evolving at a fast pace and we recognise the importance of keeping abreast of new developments in our industry. We are never satisfied and that’s why we continuously improve and evaluate our processes. We like to reflect on what we’ve done and challenge ourselves to make it even better; that’s how we’ve grown steadily over the years – continuously learning and developing. With every project we learn something new, so we regularly update our guidelines and processes so that all of our clients and their sites benefit from the acquired knowledge.

You have reached the end!

We hope that we’ve given you at least a small insight into the world of WordPress development at Moove. Web development is complex and although we’ve tried to simplify what we do, don’t worry if some of what we’ve written was a little technical. We will go into more details with future posts dedicated to individual aspects of WordPress web development.

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