WordPress Development

Create a Proof of Concept, Prototype, MVP, or Solution

Buy Budget. Buy Time. Get Funded. Develop Agile Solutions.

Starting with true custom development isn’t always necessary or doesn’t make sense depending on several factors. In these situations, WordPress can provide an adequate solution or functional alternative to complete custom development. WordPress is a super customizable, robust platform making it easy for organizations to go from concept to proof of thought or even a solution when the core functionality of the application they want to develop is standard.

Buy Time

WordPress Core + Plugins allow you to quickly create solutions that may be suitable depending on your expectations and requirements. At the very least, it buys you time while a scalable individualized solution is generated.

Buy Budget

It can buy you budget by enabling you to create a cost-effective proof of concept that can be presented to stakeholders who need to sign off on budget allocations.

Funding

If you have a new business idea and are looking for funding, WordPress provides an economical way to validate it and persuade investors of its potential.

Agile Solutions

It’s excellent for developing agile solutions when your requirements are still evolving and need solidifying before initiating a custom development project.

But be willing to compromise.

QAT Global can deliver WordPress solutions with a high percentage of the functionality you are looking for. This is where being willing to compromise comes in. That last percentage of functionality may require custom development, or it may require some level of compromise.

Types of Solutions WordPress is Best Suited For

Prototyping

Mobile PWAs

Enterprise CMS

Web Applications

When NOT to Use WordPress

In some cases, WordPress is not a solution that will best fit your business needs.

Your App Needs to Be Highly Real-Time
You Plan to Sell or License Your Site’s Technology
If You Don’t Want to Manage Processes or Steps in the Backend of WordPress Manually
Another Platform is Available That Will Get You “There” Faster
If You’re Not Willing to Make Any Compromises on Functionality

Why Creative Hive Labs @ QAT Global

We have been doing WordPress development since 2009. With over a decade of experience in the development of WordPress, we have extensive WordPress core, integration, theme, and plugin expertise. We put this expertise to use daily, developing content management systems (CMS), innovative web applications, progressive web applications (PWAs), and prototypes that offer accelerated application development for various business needs.

As professionals in custom software development for enterprise organizations, Creative Hive Labs is uniquely positioned to help you:

Design a path for the future development of your solution to meet your growth needs.
Strategically decide on whether custom development or WordPress is best for your project.
Transition your WordPress solution into a complete custom development project.

When you’re ready for a truly custom web development solution, you can seamlessly transition to working with the custom software development team at QAT Global. Since Creative Hive Labs is a division of QAT Global, we are able to provide a single-company path from WordPress-based solutions to full custom development. This provides customers with a strong advantage as their needs evolve, they gain market traction, or they gain additional startup funding, since the team that helped them get to that point will also be there to help them as they grow their solution.

Why WordPress

Fast Development

Core WordPress functionality
Extensive development support ecosystem
Existing free and paid plugins
Diverse free & commercial themes
Integration capabilities

Flexible

Quickly add new functionality
Multisite and multilingual functionality
Web and mobile apps
Headless capabilities
Scalable
Customizable

Easily Updated

Content
Labels
Menus
Design elements
Non-technical users can make updates
Core
Plugins & theme

Affordable

Free WordPress core
Overall lower development costs
Low-cost hosting options
Opensource & vendor-neutral
Large assortment of free/low-cost plugins and themes

Technical Benefits of Using WordPress for Enterprise Solutions

Flexibility and Extensibility

WordPress’s platform is expandable extensible via plugins. It allows you to quickly add a wide variety of existing application functionality to meet your needs inexpensively and promptly. The easy-to-understand framework permits a high level of solution flexibility, allowing teams to move through prototyping and deployment quickly.

Affordability

WordPress, MySQL, PHP, and most plugins are all free. While hosting is not free, depending on the size of your web app and the amount of traffic to your site, it is relatively inexpensive. Rates are significantly lower with WordPress developers than .NET or Java developers when it comes to custom functionality not found in existing plugins.

Supports Responsive Development

Support for responsive designs that are user-friendly on any type or size of device is a must. Core WordPress themes and the majority of commercial themes are responsive by default. Developers can also pick from one of the responsive WordPress theme frameworks or create a custom theme to meet their individual needs.

Open Source

Companies are not locked in to working with one vendor due to WordPress’s open-source nature. Enterprise clients have a wide variety of solution provider options, and the issues with black-box solutions that are expensive to upgrade and hard to customize are eliminated.

SEO-Friendly

WordPress is particularly SEO-friendly, especially when an SEO plugin is used. Enterprise companies in markets where the organic search is key to competitive success or concentrate on providing high-value content will find WordPress provides SEO support unavailable with other options.

Regular Updates

WordPress is regularly updated, another advantage of using the platform. Updates include improving security as well as those for new functionality. WordPress does not require a site rebuild to update the software. WordPress offers manual, one-click, and automatic background updates.

Highly Scalable

Another advantage is that WordPress is highly scalable. With a solid database configuration, reliable WordPress hosting, and the mindful use of plugins, your solution-type possibilities are essentially endless. Working at an enterprise scale for advanced caching techniques, web server optimization, or database tuning will not require developers to reinvent the wheel.

Multi-site and Multilingual Functionality

WordPress Multisite allows users to handle complex requirements for a network of sites with one installation. Overhead is reduced in terms of resources and admin time. Multilingual solutions are also simple to execute using specialized language plugins that manage content being translated and displayed.

REST API

The WordPress REST API opens WordPress up to a more extensive programmatic world by enabling applications to cooperate by sending and receiving data as JSON objects. Rest API allows developers to bring WordPress content into separate applications, create powerful interfaces for managing and publishing site content, and build new interactive front-end experiences.

Easy Content Management

WordPress has grown into a robust CMS with a powerful yet straightforward UI that eliminates the requirement for IT support to make routine changes. Non-technical users can quickly post content, make it accessible through the web browser, and add or edit pages. They can also create buttons, forms, menus, and other navigation elements without coding.

Role Management

WordPress offers simple role management for numerous access levels. Admins can set different levels of access through capabilities systems and user roles. Admins can control the actions available for specific users and who has access to content. They can also create unique roles and capabilities to regulate access to the site’s custom functionality.

User-Friendly

WordPress has extremely friendly user and admin interfaces. Even those with little experience can navigate around the WordPress back-end due to its highly intuitive nature. Once development is concluded, it can be maintained by someone without coding or programming skills. Plus, you can quickly create user-friendly URLs with accessible Permalink settings.

The WordPress Ecosystem

The WordPress platform, by default, is well-optimized; however, to ensure optimal performance and quality, it still requires a specialized enterprise hosting environment. Managed WordPress hosting solutions provide automated backups, highly functional server setups, security arrangements, and caching layers.

WordPress REST API

WordPress REST API allows WordPress to be utilized as an application framework. Developers can use the API to set the front-end apart from the core software to create desktop and mobile applications creating entirely customized websites that look nothing like a WordPress site.

The WordPress API is a JSON API and was created to work well with Javascript and other languages such as Python, Ruby, and more. You can create, update, display, read, and delete data using the API, use modern JavaScript frameworks, and go beyond PHP when creating front-ends in WordPress.

Managing Upgrades and Updates

Managing upgrades and updates can be tedious, depending on the number of third-party services or plugins you have installed and the WordPress site’s complexity. Security fixes, minor updates, update automatically periodically and often do not cause any functional issues. More extensive version updates focused on functionality can be more complex, depending on your particular setup. Several things should be done with enterprise solutions to minimize potential upgrade issues:

WordPress Development - Plugin Updates and Upgrades

Staging Environments

Before applying updates, clones of each environment should be created. Staging environments help to identify any issues generated and should be used for testing before proceeding to production.

Code Reviews

Before deploying plugin updates to an existing project, code reviews should be conducted to identify performance or security issues. Code reviews can be automated, manual, or both.

Manual QA

Quality assurance specialists should do tests on the main feature set to guarantee everything runs smoothly.

Version-Controlled Environment

Version control allows you to easily revert to previous versions when updating the core software, content, plugins, or themes. It also allows team members to work on different site portions and then merge them back into the main codebase.

Automated Deployment

Automated deployments ensure that our updated code makes it from development to production without breaking anything. These workflows typically include version control, testing, and multiple environments. The use of automation tools is key to the workflow.

UI Testing

Before pushing to production, various tools can be used to catch UI bugs. You can record Selenium tests and perform visual regression testing to eliminate risk during WordPress updates.

Log Investigation

Turning on WordPress debugging mode provides error logs that allow you to troubleshoot specific issues that can be replicated. In addition, manually browsing PHP/MySQL error logs will also help catch potential bugs.

Common WordPress Myths

Open Source is a Con

In some corporate world sectors, people think open source software is unreliable at the enterprise level. That is inaccurate. Linux, a family of open-source operating systems, is increasing its presence within enterprise organizations and supplying power to the vast majority of the web. Large firms such as Google and Facebook have open-source at the center of their technology stacks.

WordPress’ status as an open-source design should not hold you back. Its dedication to the GPL is a significant benefit. It allows the software to thrive and equips businesses with a robust platform to deliver individualized services.

WordPress is Not Secure

Enterprise businesses are often worried about the security capabilities of WordPress. With the current online security environment, these concerns are both well-justified and rational. However, the core WordPress software is seldom the reason for a security breach.

Thanks to a security team of 25 experts, WordPress has become highly secure. The team is making the best practice steps for locking down the platform well-known and has prioritized security releases. Security-conscious organizations, including large enterprise organizations and governments, have moved to WordPress.

The majority of security problems reported with WordPress website projects are related to:

The WordPress Theme
Files accessible to the public that may hold sensitive data (robots.txt, .htaccess, sitemaps)
Password regulations (length, complexity, expiration times)
Insecure decisions about user uploads

Custom directories and files serving data within the WordPress core folder
The hosting environment/configuration
Lack of user account rules (limited roles and capabilities, logging in with 2-factor authentication, session timeouts)
WordPress plugin
MySQL, Apache, PHP, or other services ran on the Linux container