WordPress is one of the most used CMS out there. It’s said to power about 25% of the internet. With its rich plugin repository, it’s a popular choice for a CMS as it allows you to avoid rewriting several functionalities. While there are plenty of existing themes available, nothing really beats a custom WordPress development, particularly customized for you.

Why go custom?

A custom WordPress development has the advantage of being specifically thought out for your brand, so there is no compromise on adjusting to “what’s available”, also it helps you keep the codebase lean as most themes come bloated with a bunch of features that you will most likely not use.

A theme is created in a step-by-step process and a certain time frame is set for each step, here we walk you through each step and the process involved in custom WordPress Development

Understanding the requirements

This is the most important step in Custom WordPress Development, put down your objectives clearly. Work with your business analyst to understand the following:

•  Who your target audience is?
• What’s the messaging that makes the most sense for them?
• What are the different pages that you need to have?
• What are you looking to get from your website: Brand positioning or leads?
• What is your digital marketing strategy?

Try to spend as much as time possible in this step to have a clear outlook of what’s required in order to avoid future rework.

It takes about a week to complete this task.

Documentation and Visual representation

The next essential step is to document and visually communicate the requirements. Most development agencies prefer building wireframes that are indicative of the layout and messaging, some of the popular tools include Balsamiq or mockups. This step clearly communicates to the client what elements will be present on each page and what the information hierarchy will be.

Most folks get a sense of direction of their requirements after their requirements are visually represented and this is a great step to finalize on the layout and requirements of a client.

It usually takes nearly a week to do the same.

Building up of style guide UI Kit

Once the wireframes are confirmed, the next logical step is to build a style guide and UI Kit. A style guide is a derivative of the brand colors. It covers the color scheme that the site will have as well as the typography (fonts). A style guide attempts to have one common central reference point for all styling elements the website will have.

A UI kit will have basic designs of the common elements that the site will have like: buttons, heading fonts, anchor links, bullet and numbered lists, etc.

This task can be accomplished within 2 to 3 days.

Combining wireframes with style guides and UI kit

Next, we need to combine the wireframes and the style guides along with the UI kit to create actual compositions of what the site will look like. Based on the requirements, some of the common pages that get designed are the home page, the single layout page, and specific pages like the contact and career page. Popular tools used for creating mock-ups include Adobe Photoshop and Sketch.

The timespan required to complete this task will be one to two weeks.

Building the Front end

In this stage, all the mock-up pages are converted into an HTML Website. By doing so, a lifeless dummy form of the website can be created in which all the UI elements will be made available without functionalities. To build the front end of the website, we make use of HTML 5, CSS 3 in this stage.

Approximately, it may take two weeks to complete this step.

Coding

During this stage, by developing the necessary coding, the HTML website is converted into WordPress. All the single-page layout is created. Added to it, every detail such as buttons and other widgets are coded using WordPress and brought to life.

One may require 1.5-2 weeks to complete this specific process.

Quality Analysis

Similar to any other project, once the custom website is developed using WordPress, the QC team will do testing of the website. They see to it whether the deliverable website fits the mock-up site that was earlier developed. They also perform device testing and responsive testing.

In order to avoid major changes in the final output, they perform testing on the website parallel after each deliverable stage.

This step takes about 3-5 days to complete in total.

Handover of the Website

This is the final stage during which the completed customized website will be handed over to the client. Code cleaning and another documentation process will be performed in this step.

It will take two days time to accomplish this task

Wrapping it up

In short, if you want to build a custom site with the right process and the highest quality it will take around 4-6 weeks of time to develop a customized WordPress theme, provided you must rely upon a good choice of website development company that owns the experience, expertise and customer-friendly strategies in their service.

At Siam we have built over 150+ custom WordPress sites, check out our portfolio here and write to us if you think we can be of help.