I spent about a month from start to finish to conceptualise, design and build my website. The first three days of that month were spent building a quick landing page just to get rid of the default GoDaddy landing page (although it’s actually one of the better ones – Names.co.uk, hang your heads in shame)!

Tools:

• MAMP – Local development
• Atom – Code editor
• Susy – Intelligent layout framework. When you combine it with Sass Mixins, it makes it incredibly quick and easy to build layouts in minutes.
• Grunt – Frontend task runner. We use it for Autoprefixer, copying files, uglify, compiling Sass and running Compass.
• HTML 5 Boilerplate – We’ve taken the original and spruced it up a bit.
• Icomoon – Free icon sets
• WordPress – In our opinion, the most user-friendly CMS around.
• Github – Code repository
• GoDaddy – Our domain and hosting provider.
• Unsplash – Creative Commons licensed photos.
• ImageOptim – Local image optimisation.

Plugins:

• Advanced Custom Fields
• Contact Form 7
• Custom Post Type UI
• Insert Post Ads
• Instagram Feed
• Layered Popups
• Layered Popups – Subscribe & Download
• Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore
• WP-Sweep
• WP Encrypt
• Yoast SEO

Just a note on plugins, please do some background research on them. Not just to see if they’re reliable, updated regularly and secure, but also if their purpose can be achieved by an online service or a plugin that’s already installed.

For example, there are popular plugins that can do Image Optimisation on the site but this requires a substantial amount of processing power. This same task can be safely done on your desktop with free tools such as ImageOptim.

I plan to write a couple of more posts to expand on WordPress development i.e. recommended plugins and performance & security tips, so keep an eye out for that.

I’m sure I’ve missed a thing or two, so apologies if that’s the case. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to get in touch.