Selecting a WordPress development agency

Picking a WordPress development agency? This guide helps you evaluate skills, process, pricing, security, and flexibility.

In this guide:

• What WordPress can do for you and your business
• Why Rouge is your best option
• Six reasons to choose WordPress – Why WordPress is a favoured CMS
• Don’t  just take our word for it – client reviews and some backup data
• Some quality example WordPress websites from Rouge.

As a specialist WordPress web design and development agency, we eat, sleep and dream about WordPress – it is what we use to produce beautiful and clever business websites for our clients, time after time.

We deliver powerful functionality on a secure and optimised WordPress content management system for organisations of all shapes and sizes.

We create bespoke designs and use WordPress as your powerful and efficient CMS (Content Management System) for editing and operating your marketing campaigns and content. Just imagine what we could do for you.

• Design and develop highly functional WordPress websites and applications
• Integrate WordPress with other systems such as CRMs, databases and APIs
• Optimise your current WordPress site (speed, accessibility, security)
• Hosting, support and maintenance for WordPress sites
• Migrate your current non-WordPress content into a new WordPress website
• Upgrade your website to the latest version of WordPress.

Aside from good ol’ experience and expertise, we have accreditations and processes in place that ensure that everything we create is delivered on time, on budget, and exceeding your expectations. We are about the transparency of our processes, the quality of our work, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Rouge meets the needs of modern business. We go out of our way to create websites and branding that achieve business success for our customers. We deliver websites and designs that exceed the high standards demanded by our customers – across strategic, compliance, security and performance.

Process driven quality assurance
We are an ISO 9001 accredited agency. We have a recognised quality management system that helps us consistently meet and exceed customer requirements.

Government CyberEssentials and ISO 27001 certified
We understand the importance of protecting your data and your customers’ data by not leaving security to chance.

Exceptional customer service
Customer satisfaction is our number one goal, and our NPS (Net Promoter Score) shows we’re doing a pretty good job at it.

21 years and growing strong
From the early days of kitchen tables and coffee shops, Rouge has flourished into a compact and highly capable digital design agency. Our aim is simple: to consistently deliver websites and brands that matter.

We ♡ WordPress
Our clients love WordPress, and so do we. As a WordPress design and development agency, we eat, sleep and dream about WordPress – it’s what produces beautiful and powerful websites for our clients, time after time.

Wirehive Top 50
We don’t take gongs too seriously, but it’s always nice to be recognised for hard work, creativity and innovation.

WordPress is a powerful tool. In the right hands, with the right balance of design and development WordPress is an outstanding platform for any business website, of any scale, and complexity. These are, according to our clients, the most 5 most important advantages to be gained from a WordPress website from Rouge:

1. Ease of use – bespoke CMS actions created for you and your content team
WordPress is famously easy to use, but we do not take this for granted. We take a content management brief at the beginning of the project to make sure we’ve covered all the important activities that you’ll need to do. We offer training and ongoing support for you and your team so that the website works hard for you and that the WordPress admin area is never a thing to be feared.

2. SEO – your website Search Engine Optimisation ready
When developed with coding best practices and industry-standard SEO plugins, WordPress is an SEO specialist’s first choice. Like a content manager, an SEO specialist can manage everything from within the CMS, without the ongoing need of a developer. Technical SEO and on-page SEO are considered for every project.

3. Security – Enterprise-level security for your business website
There are some that look down on WordPress from a security point of view, yet WordPress is the web’s most popular content management system. It is the proliferation of WordPress and having more websites in ‘harm’s way’, that makes it a target. We can confidently state that a WordPress website will deliver enterprise-level security – if it is correctly configured, uses professional, validated plugins, and is backed by a solid agency partnership and support agreement.

At Rouge, we build security best practices into every WordPress website and consult with you on how to do your part to keep the website safe. Technology does not stand still, and hackers do not need to be asked twice, so we also offer intrusion monitoring as part of our WordPress website maintenance and support service.

4. Accessibility – WordPress website access for everyone
Accessibility has always been important in our opinion. Removing barriers for those with limited access has been a passion of ours since we worked on making the Royal College of Music’s website accessible over 20 years ago. It is now a legal requirement in the UK for all public sector websites to be accessible to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Luckily, WordPress is accessible out of the box, and with our skills layered over the top, we are able to design, develop and maintain websites to the highest levels of accessibility.

5. Quality Assurance – we always improving our website design and development quality
Continuous improvement is in our DNA. We have a quality management system – ISO 9001 accreditation – which helps us to maintain consistently high quality in everything we do, whether that’s design, coding, or customer service. This means that we are able to meet your high standards, and deliver WordPress websites that a beyond the ordinary in terms of marketing performance, while still ticking every box you need for compliance.

6. Speed 
WordPress websites, when designed and developed by a professional team, can be blisteringly fast. With high coding standards, rigorous testing and the refusal to use bloated templates and plugins, high performance is baked into everything we deliver.

Over time, Rouge has developed processes and systems that deliver consistency and quality. We continuously develop and maintain a ‘seed-build’ which is an advanced WordPress install with all the core plugins and code, baked in. By not reinventing the wheel every time we build a site, we can focus on making your website the next best thing for you and us. Read more about how we develop better websites.

A WordPress designed website from Rouge provides a platform for progressive enhancement: Ongoing marketing need is turned into reality, with minimum fuss. If you are on a journey for your next business website, check out our Comprehensive Website Planning Guide.

Here are some of our happy client reviews:

“Thanks to Rouge Media’s efforts, our new websites are easier to manage and use than the previous ones. The team has delivered on time and within budget. Rouge Media proactively makes suggestions, finds solutions, holds regular catch-ups to share project plans.” Premier Foods

“They’re really amiable, professional, and prompt in their responses — we love working with them.” Heathcare organisation

“Rouge Media has successfully delivered a high-quality product, meeting strict deadlines and passing thorough user testing. The team is highly communicative, responsive, and reactive via email and phone calls. Moreover, they work hard, provide valuable feedback, and adapt to the out budget.” Nominet

“Rouge Media has helped unify our various brands through an impactful identity that is new yet recognizable. The team demonstrates a deep understanding of every objective, consistently delivering high-quality output even through tight deadlines. They are reliable and always accessible.” Dye and Durham

The power of WordPress comes from its simplicity for content editors, its flexibility for designers, and its toolkit for developers. Rouge delivers top-drawer designs partnered with powerful functionality on a secure and optimised content management system for organisations of all shapes and sizes.

Agile development can be achieved with the use of thousands of reliable plugins or from bespoke development by Rouge’s in-house WordPress development team. We can get your project moving quickly and efficiently because we do everything – from design to development – at Rouge.

The ability and scale of WordPress is nearly limitless. Once you combine the thousands of trusted and well-supported plugins with our custom development experience, we can deliver some pretty powerful stuff. Here are just a few examples of some of our recent projects:

• E-learning platform for oncologists BOPA
• Marketing automation integration connected website for Norland Nannies
• A WordPress website and interactive data customisation tool for Nominet
• Multi-language, multi-region website for electric vehicle charger leaders Instavolt
• Urban planning website for the National Trust

Explore some of our top-drawer WordPress websites, or give us a call to kick-start your high-performing WordPress website project.