THE SAMPAIR GROUP

A law firm headquartered out of Peoria Arizona, the bankruptcy office also has a location in Mesa. They needed a rush wordpress website design in Arizona, and located My Favorite Web Designs to help. I personally set the site up on a WordPress theme, since they needed a site that would also be SEO friendly.

A basic design, this web site has many defining characteristics, such as front page contact form so your online traffic can go right to conversion. It also features three column layout, which was embedded into the CMS, so all three columns could be edited without utilizing widget areas or custom post queries. Both of these common WordPress CMS techniques have drawbacks.

WordPress Websites have Widgets that often serialize the data that is stored in them, which means that it is stored in a coded shorthand. The reason this sucks is database transfer. Lets say Sampair wants to change their URL. The website can be easily transferred over to another server or another hosting account, except for the widget data, which cannot be changed easily Via PHPmyAdmin. Normally, if we changed from one URL to another or one IP to another, I can simply do a find and replace on the database. With serialized data, this does not work. The scripts that exist to circumvent this common and frustrating database storage technique frankly suck, and often break databases or do not work at all. All this in addition to complicating the websites CMS for users, which of course is a bad idea.

We could also do Custom Post queries in WordPress. We could have a post, give it a category, and call it from the template file. the problem with this technique is added load time, as a second set of database queries is executed, but it cannot be called until the first set of code gets called, so it results in more http requests. I could swing this on my private server, which is dedicated and the hardware and VM is managed by my boys at hostgator, but it is a mistake to assume all users will have this, and it is a mistake to not design with resource limitations in mind. It may have worked in this smaller, simpler website, but it is a dirty habit to start thinking of solutions that are resource heavy.

The best resource, for users who can handle a little HTML in their website content management system, is to create the additional data inside the primary data call – so all data is coming from one database table, one row. This would be problematic for more inexperienced users, since they would break the layout and not use HTML mode to edit their WordPress web design. For those, I recommend the other two methods. For myself, I train my employees to use the wordpress CMS, so i am able to have multiple SEO and content crews working on websites without being technical masters, which would drive my costs too far up.

Many thanks to Patrick Sampair and his right hand man, Rick Gordon for the opportunity, I look forward to working with you guys on optimizing and expanding your web presence in the near future!