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Redesigning a WordPress website without having to rebuild it.

Bekki Tomkins
By Bekki Tomkins
22nd September 2016

As a business or website owner, it’s perfectly normal and right to want to change the look and feel of your website from time to time. Our experience tells us that this is usually every 3-5 years and ties in with a shift in the business’s product or service offering that is also changing to meet its market.

Let’s say you had your website designed and built 5 years ago and you’re after a fresh, new look to reflect a new logo, brand or product offering perhaps. When you had it built you took the wise decision to have it built on a WordPress platform. Sweet move.

However, you need the site to have a fresh, new look and feel – does this mean you need to rebuild the website again from scratch at a greater cost than you want to be spending?

No, absolutely not!

 

The benefits of a WordPress site

A significant benefit of having your website running on a WordPress custom design means that you can get an experienced web designer and developer to create that smart, new look for your website without completely taking the engine out.

We call it ‘reskinning’. What’s happening is a new look to the layout is being created for the site’s base templates and made to look differently using the power of the code format called CSS (cascading style sheets). This CSS file tells every aspect of the website how to look – whether it’s the text, headings, position and size of images or even how the content on the page is laid out. A demonstration of the power of CSS is shown when looking at a website first on your laptop and then on your mobile phone. If the website has been built recently (and properly!) you’ll see a completely different, more mobile friendly version when viewing it on the device compared to when looking at it on your laptop. This is all achieved with CSS giving the website ‘rules’ of how to look when viewed in certain environments – such as browser sizes.

All of this is quicker, simpler and more cost effective than starting again.

Additionally, to avoid any downtime during this process, the web designers can clone the live website and then work on the templates and CSS files in a development area and work with you to get that smart, new look just right. At the point it’s ready and you’re chomping at the bit to get the new site live and tell your customers to go and check it out, the web designer merely needs to replace the base template files and CSS files on the hosting platform and – tadaah! You’ve got yourself your brand new website at a fraction of the cost of starting it from scratch.

This is all made possible because WordPress allows web designers to have complete control over how a website looks with just a few files – that means the amount of time working on the site is reduced and, as such, the cost is reduced.

 

What to expect

Now, we don’t want to be misleading you here by thinking that anyone can do this. Oh, no. A web designer’s ability to deliver that new look is based on his or her extensive knowledge of all the CSS code instructions to achieve that look or position and control over the website’s new template files.

So, if you’re are looking for a new look to your website but do not want to change the content on your site or change the page architecture or hierarchy much, a reskin is what you need and will cost you a lot less than starting again.

 

How much less, I hear you ask?

Well, as you might expect and understand, every website takes a different amount of time to build and therefore carries a varied price tag. But to give you a rough idea, if you were to rebuild a typical entry level eCommerce website from scratch, you’d need to budget for around £5k. However, if you wanted to give that existing eCommerce website a new look and feel but keep the base framework the same – you’re looking at a budget of around £1-£1.5k so it’s a Godzilla-sized saving.

 

Mobile responsive websites

Some websites were built 3-4 years ago and are working well, robust and doing what they need to. However, at that time, the web designer may not have made it mobile friendly and when your customers use your site on a mobile or tablet, they have to pinch and zoom to navigate around. That’s awful.

Not any more! Using the power of the same CSS skill our web designer has, he or she can add a mobile friendly version of your website to the existing site without going anywhere near the main site but significantly adding the number of users who can access and use the site.

Again, whilst the cost will vary depending on the size of the site and number of different page layouts it has, typically a budget of around £800-£1000 will be enough to add mobile friendly functionality to an existing website.

And when you consider 62%+ of ALL internet surfing is done on a mobile phone according to OfCom’s figures in October 2015, you will be getting a great deal more potential customers using your website.