Wordpress

Original Websites for Original Artists

musician-composer website

A redesigned WordPress website for musician-composer, Glenna Burmer. The new site merges content from burmermusic.com into a single domain for the award-winning artist. Visitors can listen and watch concert clips from SoundCloud and Vimeo. Stay tuned for the teaser trailer for the award-winning animated short film, Nana korobi, Ya oki.

The new website is simply FANTASTIC! Absolutely beautiful!
Glenna Burmer

Scope of Work

content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
color palette development
front-end web development
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Performance

Page load speed ranks in the top 10% of sites.

Google Lighthouse benchmarks
Mobile Speed: 85/100
Desktop Speed: 97/100
Accessibility: 96/100
Best Practices:  100/100
Search Engine Optimization: 93/100

WebPageTest Speed Index: 1.169 (median = ~3.591; top 10% = <1.388)

Total Page File Size: 489 Kb (In 2020, the average page size was ~2.4 Mb; the median size was ~2.1 Mb)
Total Web Server Requests: 24 (4 Scripts + 5 Images + 6 CSS files + 4 fonts + 2 Other + 1 HTML )

Team

Content Strategy by: Rita Cipalla
Visual Design by: Joan van den Berg
Banner artwork: Descending Dragon by Nobu Burmer | Banner photo: Sakurajima volcano, Kyushu, Japan, by Glenna Burmer
WordPress Theme Development by: Scott Marlow

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What Would WordPress Do?

City of Gig Harbor parks website

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world. WordPress powers 42% of all websites; and 62% of CMS-powered sites.

But not all WordPress sites are created equal.

One of my favorite tasks is showing clients the benefits of open source technology. In particular, I enjoy demonstrating Core Web Vitals for open source WordPress Themes vs. cheap, popular paid commercial themes from vendors like ThemeForest. I primarily use Google Lighthouse to evaluate sites, but I also rely on Pingdom, WebPageTest and other benchmarking tools.

This latest nonprofit project for PenMet Parks in Gig Harbor involved rebuilding a commercial theme-powered WordPress site with my favorite Theme, _Underscores.

The client’s previous page load speed was atrocious, and the website crashed on a regular basis. Worse, content contributors could not even use the CMS to make the most basic content edits due to bloated Theme and Plugin features.

By following better WordPress and web standards, web server requests were reduced 69% and page size was reduced 73%. As a result of better web development practices, page load speed improved 78%. And the parks organization can now easily, intuitively edit all of their site content.

Scope of Work

accessibility testing
brand discovery
project management
content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
art direction
color palette development
front-end web development
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Site Statistics

Performance Metric Old Website New Website
Google Lighthouse: Mobile Performance 3/100 67/100
Google Lighthouse: Desktop Performance 12/100 92/100
Google Lighthouse: Accessibility 97/100
Google Lighthouse: Best Practices 93/100
WebPageTest Speed Index 7.176 1.831
Total Homepage File Size
(In 2020, average page size was ~2.4 Mb; median size was ~2.1 Mb)		 4.5 Mb 1.2 Mb
Total Web Server Requests 194 61
Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time ~7 seconds ~1.8 seconds

Team

Photography by Chrisy Dorsey
Visual Design by Heidi Grace
WordPress Theme Development by Scott Marlow

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Discover WordPress

Venture fund website screenshot

My latest website build for Tacoma Venture Fund, investing in early stage companies in Pierce County. This new WordPress site features bold typography, accentuated with quality duotone and black & white imagery, in a clean, modern layout optimized for larger resolution monitors.

Site Statistics

Google PageSpeed Insights
Mobile Optimization: 94/100
Desktop Optimization: 99/100

WebPageTest Speed Index: 1.767 (median = ~3.519; top 10% = <1.381)

Total Page Size: 388 Kb (In 2019, the average page size was ~ 2.4 Mb; median = ~1.9 Mb)
Total Web Server Requests: 21 (3 images + 7 scripts + 6 CSS files + 2 Font + 1 HTML) Database-driven sites are performance-optimized when requests are < 20 – 40
Page Load Speed: ~2 seconds

Site Credits

Visual Design: Heidi Grace
WordPress Theme Development: Scott Marlow

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5 Tips for Picking WordPress Plugins

How do you pick the perfect WordPress Plugin for your website?

There are over 55,000 Plugins in the official WordPress open source repository. And that does not include the tens of thousands of paid commercial Plugins available in the marketplace.

Here are 5 Tips to Pick a Plugin

  1. Open Source Software
    WordPress.org Plugins must adhere to a strict set of guidelines, including a GPL-compatible license. These guidelines include privacy, security and other requirements to help protect your site. And all WordPress.org Plugin code is vetted as part of this process.
  2. Active Installations
    Generally, the more installations have been downloaded and activated – the more likely the Plugin is reliable. More activations means more user testing across a wide variety of installations.
  3. Plugin Developer(s)
    A developer who has released multiple Plugins is another sign of confidence because that person likely has more WordPress experience. A team of Plugin contributors can also be a sign of well-tested code quality. For example, I generally trust most Plugins supported by Automattic, WordPress core contributors.
  4. Reviews
    A Plugin with a high volume of quality reviews is a testament to its effectiveness.
  5. Testing and Technical Discovery
    When evaluating Plugins, I often compare the file download size because performance is as important to me as rich features. By comparison, a similarly functioning Plugin with a significantly larger size can be an indication of code bloat and possible issues, including performance or security.
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