The Apprentice Store offers professional and cost effective website design, development and hosting services to a wide range of business sectors. We work exclusively with WordPress as it offers flexibility and acts as a great springboard for any website. Our developers are experienced in the creation of WordPress websites but are also able to carry out minor updates to any existing website.
We work with external Web Designers as we recognise that we are Web Developers and not designers. We work with 2bcreative who create unique and bespoke designs for our websites, we are equally happy to work with our client’s own designer.
WordPress Development
We will create a functionally rich website for you regardless of you being a charity, need eCommerce, are an estate agent, have members to engage with or simply want to showcase your business online. We have built websites for many different organisations with some designed by our own Web Designers, designers chosen by the client and even directly with the client. WordPress uses themes as the base design of any website and whilst there are thousands of themes available to choose from we find that many are poorly supported and create restrictions on what can be delivered. The theme chosen for a WordPress site is the foundation for the site and as a result we implement every client website with a solid theme foundation so we can add value and functionality with the confidence that the stability, security, performance and functionality meets the needs of the client.
The Apprentice Store delivers every website project using a simple staged framework as it allows for a structured delivery of a project, regardless of its size and complexity:
Discover
This phase of a project is iterative and allows us to work with the client and supplier to define the scope of the project. Due to our process being iterative, the final agreed scope and therefore cost and timescale will not be understood until this stage of the process has been completed. This process may only be iterated through once on simple projects; however, it may take weeks in more complex projects.
Design
This phase of a project allows us to design the solution to meet the project aims identified during the Discover phase. We will choose technology, solution architecture and determine resource needed to complete the project. At this stage of the project we should be able to provide a clear specification, timescale and cost for the project based on the agreed scope. This phase of the project may be repeated due to variations identified in the scope after an iteration of the Discover phase.
Develop
This phase of a project is where the agreed solution is implemented and sees the solution being developed to meet the agreed scope of work. On smaller projects this could be a single stage but on larger projects could be delivered in a number of stages to allow for client feedback and additional clarification of the project scope. It can be possible during this phase to repeat the Discover and Design phases for variations that are identified and agreed to be investigated.
Deploy
This phase of a project sees the project being released, typically into production but also includes training, data conversion and initial support as agreed within the scope of works. Most projects will operate with a single Deploy phase but more complex project with multiple Develop stages may have multiple Deploy stages.
Our websites are typically built on a fixed fee contract basis by completing a Discover phase to prepare our proposal. The typical websites development cost is between £600-£4,500 with this subject to the agreed scope. We typically look to complete the development of websites within 6-8 weeks of the design being agreed with the client being involved at stages in the development to ensure that the finished products meets their specific needs. We warrant all of our projects for 60 days from go live to ensure that any small teething issues are resolved without extra fee.
WordPress Support
The Apprentice Store recognises that at times the project scope, budget or timescale do not demand that a whole new website is needed and as a result we are happy to implement changes to existing WordPress installations that we or other developers have built. We should be able to offer a fixed price and quick quotation to implement the changes where the website is one that we built. If the website is not one that we have built, we will require to understand the framework that is in place and also the scope of the changes to offer a price to complete the works. In all cases we will try to complete the support work for a fixed fee but in some cases the changes will need to be delivered based on time spent if the scope of work is too variable.
We do recognise that at times the client wants to make the changes themselves and simply requires some guidance on how to make those changes as they are not familiar with WordPress and how to add/change things. Every WordPress website is different due to the theme and plugin selection used to build the website and add functionality. The Apprentice Store is happy to share our knowledge with clients for a fee, to empower them to be able to manage their own website, isn’t that the reason why Content Management Systems exist by removing the need for the developer to make small and simple changes?
WordPress Hosting
The Apprentice Store operates with our own dedicated and managed hosting services through our hosting partner fasthosts. The Apprentice Store chose fasthosts for their WordPress website hosting as they offer world class hosting with quality support services. We also partner with fasthosts and Microsoft for bespoke hosting requirements as we recognise that not every website project or budget demands the scope of services offered by our Managed WordPress service as they may not be based on WordPress for instance.
Our Enhanced WordPress Hosting service includes the following:
- Generous bandwidth and storage storage allowance.
- Access to a global CDN to ensure that local servers serve the static data for optimum performance.
- Security features from CloudFlare to ensure top security of your website at all times.
- WordPress Maintenance driven by AI technology to keep the website updated on a daily basis with this covering WordPress Core, Themes and Plugins where 3rd party licensing is not preventing it.
- Our time to address basic issues with the site due to updates through manual intervention.
- Daily backup of the website with 30 day retention.
We believe that whilst there is cheaper WordPress hosting, our service offers great value for money as many of the features we include as standard are additional services under other support agreements that could cost 4-5 times our service fee.