Our old house had built-in bookshelves. That’s a nice feature. They looked good in our living room.
Unfortunately, when we moved, we found a place without the shelves. We had to go buy some bookshelves and put them together.
That’s a lot like what you experience when you have a WordPress website with tools built in to it. That’s what we’ve been doing on our family law website.
The law firms winning on the web are almost always running their websites on WordPress. It’s by far the leading content management system for websites. Odds are that, if you’re serious about your website, you’re using it.
One of the wonderful things about WordPress is that you can quickly and easily change your website theme. For an investment of a few dollars, you can visit a theme marketplace, like Theme Forest, and buy something new for as little as $4. In a few minutes, you can install the theme and completely refresh the site to the latest look and feel.
Our North Carolina Divorce website is built on a standard WordPress theme. We’ve done some customization, but we try to keep the site as “out of the box” as possible so that we can keep our costs down. We prefer to buy standardized technology and integrate pieces rather than being forced to build our own.
Unfortunately, some of the most visited and useful features of our site are not something we can simply buy. For instance, our North Carolina Child Support Calculator and Attorney Fee Calculator can’t simply be purchased from a vendor as a standard offering. We have to have these tools built by a developer.
How to Simplify Web Customization
In the old days (like a few months ago), we built those tools into our theme. That required custom development and meant that we had to move the code and customize it each time we wanted to switch themes. The need to customize the theme eliminates much of the benefit of WordPress. Moving the tools was a big hassle.
The tools built into our site are much like bookshelves built into your house.
We really want the flexibility to switch themes. We’re constantly testing and tweaking the site as we grow the audience. We test pages and tools to find out what’s well received and what isn’t so we can optimize the experience of the visitor. Switching themes is important to our progress.
That’s why we had the tools rebuilt as plugins. Plugins (which are simply add-ons you can plug right into WordPress) aren’t theme specific. You can change the theme and keep using your existing plugins without much trouble. Moving the tools to plugins allows us to swap out modules (the theme and plugins) without having to hire a developer to create custom code for the site.
Now that we’ve separated the theme from the tools by building our custom plugins, we can move each piece easily from theme to theme. It’s like we’ve got bookshelves we can load up and move to a new house. It’s wonderful and flexible.
How to Get Your Own Plugins
How did we get our plugins made?
We hired a freelancer to do the work. We like to find developers on Upwork. In fact, we’ve created some material on how to hire freelancers that you might find useful. We posted a project, selected a developer, and got to work. A month later, we had our first plugin up and running.
Obviously, developing plugins isn’t for everyone. But, if you’re investing the time in building tools for your website visitors anyway, then it makes sense to build them as plugins rather than customize your theme. If building plugins and other advanced marketing tactics are your thing, then you might be interested in joining our membership offering at Rosen Institute. We just finished going deep on plugins, and you’ll have access to that material as well as the material on hiring freelance developers.
By building with plugins, you’ll end up with a beautiful home. You won’t have built-in bookshelves, but you’ll have very nice shelves you can easily move when the need arises.
