About us.

  • Formed in 1997, incorporated in 1999
  • 16 current staff based out of our studio in Oxfordshire
  • Privately held and operated
  • Working with WordPress since 2010
  • Everything is done in-house

Our services.

We’re a full-service agency:

  • Advertising (print & online)
  • Annual Reports (print & digital)
  • Branding
  • Corporate Identity
  • Ephemera
  • Graphic design
  • Hosting
  • Infographics & illustration
  • Motion graphics
  • Print design
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • UX Design
  • Website planning and strategy
  • WordPress design & build
  • WordPress Support & Maintenance

 

Our WordPress approach.

  • We design and build fully bespoke WordPress sites
  • Everything is built on our own barebones WordPress theme
  • Content is managed via custom-built modules that are unique to every site we create
  • We avoid reliance on Javascript
  • Our sites are built mobile-first and are fully accessible
  • We build for user experience and ease-of-use
  • Our content tools extend WordPress and make managing content quick and intuitive
  • We work with the classic WordPress editor, or the Gutenberg editor, depending on your requirements
  • Our clients don’t need to bend into our way of building sites, we build the sites our clients need

Our Process

Below is a simplified overview of our process.

1 Project set up

A simple stage of the project where all the team read the brief, our proposal and where we also like to have a quick 15-minute online meeting to introduce everyone.

2 Planning

Websites can be complex projects, so we spend a budget-appropriate amount of time getting everything lined up and ready to go.

This includes project assets, content, sitemaps, keywords, rankings and anything that will be required to get the project completed.

When we are replacing an existing website, extra care is taken to document SERPs placements, current SEO and URL structures.

3 Wireframing & Design

Planning the information architecture and hierarchy of your website’s pages, planning content sections, editable modules and general layout.

The wireframe stage of any website project is one of the most important so we spend a significant amount of time on this stage before it moves into the design stage.

During the design stage, we let the creatives loose to produce big-idea concepts, initial designs and design development.

Depending on the brief and any existing brand guidelines, we may produce one initial design or a range of concepts to explore.

4 Site build & content

Everything is built from the ground up on our secure development servers.

Depending on the content supply process, we will employ an agile or waterfall approach to the site build and content process that fits best with your team and process.

During this stage, all the custom content modules with be created (back-end) and styled (front-end).

5 Functionality

We try, where possible, to only use our own Premium WordPress plugins for specific functionality, and we avoid too much bespoke development work – this keeps your site open, accessible and less likely to become outdated.

We own developer-level licences to a lot of must-use WordPress plugins, using them across our client’s sites at no additional cost to you.

Premium plugins are always in a proactive development cycle which means the authors keep them secure, up-to-date and safe to use.

We advise against installing too many plugins on your WordPress site (especially free ones) as this can cause conflicts and issues.

6 Snagging, responsive and go live

During these final stages, we use a mark-up tool to allow our clients to comment and make notes directly on the in-progress website.

These comments then form to-do lists that are actioned and marked as complete. This process ensures the site is thoroughly checked through prior to going live.

Our WordPress theme is mobile-first, but we leave the final responsive CSS work until all the content is in place. This approach means we are viewing and working with live-content and checking what the eventual site visitors will see.

Search Engine Optimisation.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, so we explore this on a per-project basis. Generally, our SEO work falls into one of the approaches below:

  1. When working with content that has already been written and approved, we suggest the best focus keyword for the page and suggest our clients write the meta descriptions
  2. If the content has not been written, we can suggest keywords for content based on SEO research, the content then needs to be written in line with the research

Contrary to what some people think, you cannot simply do SEO – effective search engine optimisation touches every aspect of your website – from your hosting environment to your image ALT tags.

If SEO is to be retrofitted to existing content, we then suggest an ongoing SEO plan for research, benchmarking and improvement.

If SEO is to be planned before the content is written, we suggest this is viewed as a separate (and sizable) project.

Ongoing support and maintenance.

We have a range of flexible plans to help you with your new website moving forward.

These range from simple time-based ‘minutes per month‘ plans where you can submit tickets and requests that are actioned in line with an SLA and the time is removed from your monthly allocation.

For larger sites, we can create bespoke support plans based on your own requirements.

We don’t tie clients into lengthy contracts, and all plans can be dialled up or down as required.

Support time is also not limited just to the website work, it can be used on any of the services offered by Toast, from artworking to web development.

Toast Support

Who do we work with?

WordPress is an incredibly flexible platform which means we work with a wide range of clients that include:

A full list of recent projects can be supplied on request, as can references from clients.

 

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