Are you a small business from the Greater Toronto Area planning to launch your first website or do you wish to re-brand an existing site?  Theme-based websites (such as WordPress) are ideal and handy for customers that wish to maintain their own content, posts regular news, manage a photo / media library and even sell retail products on-line using a plugin such as WooCommerce. 17 Designs offers Web Design for Small Business just for you!

WordPress was first developed as a Blog tool but quickly expanded to include themes for all types of businesses.  Today, it is a common practice to choose an existing WordPress theme with clients and re-style it to match their corporate identity.

We recommend that clients investigate reputable WordPress theme depositories such as,

• www.templatemonster.com
• www.mojomarketplace.com
• www.themeforest.net

Custom WordPress Themes Available

17 Designs can also prepare a WordPress theme from scratch. We are WordPress certified developers and we have the experience / expertise to set up your site correctly and securely.

Dearcroft Montessori is an example of a WordPress theme we developed in-house.

Whatever option you prefer for your small business, your website will benefit from the integrated SEO capabilities and simply to use interface of WordPress. Contact Us for a demonostration.

A hand-coded, scratch-built website can be extremely powerful as it allows the web developer to take advantage of the power of CSS3 styling options available:

• Transparencies
• Rounded Corners
• Overlapping Content
• Shadowing
• Background Imagery
• Embedded Custom Fonts

In addition, organic search engine optimization (SEO) can be coded directly into the site content ensuring your website is highly recognizable by search engines.

The strongest benefit of a hand-coded website is SECURITY!!

Hackers love to attack WordPress websites.  Hackers will take advantage of WordPress security flaws. To keep hackers at bay WordPress must be constantly updated which means on-going support costs. 17 Designs is fine at protecting your WordPress site from hackers but it is important to know WordPress maintenance cannot be ignored.

By constrast, a hand-coded, scratch-built website will OUT LAST any WordPress website and likely need less maintenance.

The long and short of it is small businesses are concerned about costs, and frankly, WordPress is still cheaper! We will glady hand-code a custom, scratch-built website but if your business is on a tight budget stick to WordPress.

A WordPress website will function perfectly on a shared hosting environment that supports the most current version of PHP and allows for MySQL databases.  WordPress is written in PHP however it interacts with several MySQL database tables.  To keep your WordPress website safe, error free and secure from website hackers we recommend regular site updates.  As part of a regular maintenance service 17 Designs will happily keep your WordPress website current.

Dedicated hosting would be overkill for a small business and is recommended more for medium to large product-based websites.