LOOKING FOR HELP WITH WORDPRESS?
YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Speaking code is like, well, speaking in code. So we’ve created this handy guide that tells you everything you need to know about WordPress, working with us, and everything in between. We’ve even created a handy glossary.
WHY WORDPRESS?
WordPress isn’t just the world’s most popular content management system because it powers over 40% of the internet.
It’s one of the most adaptable platforms available thanks to the fact that it’s open source. It allows contributors to develop and share their own themes, plugins and tools. This constant innovation and user evolution means websites like yours the best they can be.
As WordPress VIP Partners, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking we’re a little bias on the subject. So let us tell you why we’re such big fans:
ADAPTABLE
WordPress is super adaptable, meaning that WordPress websites can easily be changed or host third-party integrations.
CUSTOMISABLE
Everything within WordPress is customizable. This means your theme can be designed down to even the smallest pixel, and you can install or develop whichever plugin you want.
HIGH FUNCTIONALITY
Thanks to plugins, the functionality possibilities of WordPress are endless. It’s particularly well suited for purpose-built plugins, like WooCommerce, when it comes to anything eCommerce.
SECURE
You’ll read a lot about the security of WordPress, but we can’t stress this enough, WP sites are secure providing you keep your site up to date! Luckily, we’re here to help with those niggly updates, making sure your CMS transitions smoothly and error-free.
SEO FRIENDLY
As a standard, WordPress is written in standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup, meaning it’s easy for search engines to read. To make the deal even sweeter, you can download a whole host of SEO plugins to help, like the increasingly popular Yoast plugin.
MULTIPLE MEDIA TYPES
WordPress sites master the art of multiple media types. With the ability to support images, videos, Twitter feeds, and much more, it’s the ideal CMS for mass-content producers, publishers or media owners.
EXPERT DEVELOPERS, BIG FANS OF COFFEE.
The Powered by Coffee journey started way back in 2011 with a laptop and a lot of coffee. Since then, we’ve grown from a one-man-band outfit into a fully-fledged team of coders, marketers, and industry experts.
Over the years, we’ve fine-tuned our service offering to put collaboration and client satisfaction at the forefront of our business. We believe in only selling you what you need, building innovative digital solutions, and leaving WordPress (and the world) in a better place than when we found it.
But if we had to boil down why you should work with us into some pros and cons, here’s what it would look like:
| PROS: | CONS: |
| – We keep everything in-house; our developers are full time, meaning they’re always on hand and up to speed with any project within the agency – Fullstack, front-end or back-end? Whoever you need, we have the WordPress expertise in-house – Innovation is part of our way of working and we pioneer new digital technologies, which helps us create the best code for the project – One-off projects to long-term maintenance, whatever the job, we’re known for delivering best in class service – London is our hub, but our reach goes across the pond as we work with clients in the UK & the US – We’re strictly a jargon-free zone so that we can effectively collaborate with our clients | – We don’t have an office dog* *We’re more cat people anyway… |
PROJECTS: HOW WE WORK
From projects to maintenance, we keep everything in-house with our tight knit team of developers.
Step One: Call
We’ll pencil in a time to chat about what you’re looking for in your project. We’ll typically want to know:
About you; what’s your brand? What does your company do?
What problems are you looking to solve?
Do you have a strict deadline and, if so, what is it?
What is your budget?
If you’re not using WordPress currently, which CMS are you using?
Once we have all the information we need, we’ll send over a proposal of the next steps for you before getting started on your project.
Step Two: Colaborate
When we get to work on your project, we’ll start by outlining the project’s next steps. Think big ideas, creative solutions, video calls – all the good stuff.
We’ll introduce you to the team members who will be working on your project and your main points of contacts; one of our super talented developers. They’ll be liaising with you directly, working on the project and working on any tickets you raise post-project.
After we’ve got the fun stuff over and done with, we’ll get down to business and share our Jira project timeline with you and set you up with a GitHub login. These two tools are essential during the project; they show you exactly what we’re doing, when, and how it’s looking so far.
Step Three: Testing
Ahead of launching your project, your dedicated developers will be testing and trialling the work they’ve done. We purposely run several rounds of quality assurance to ensure everything’s running as it should be.
Though we pride ourselves on our brilliant in-house coding skills, we make it our responsibility to check each others work as part of our quality assurance procedures.
Step Four: Launch!
We’ll make sure your servers and hosting is prepared for launch so that you can enjoy a seamless transition or integration.
At this point, it’s a good time to consider long-term maintenance to ensure your fancy new plugin, theme or website continues to tick along nicely. We’ll make sure to mention our monthly maintenance packages at the end of the project, but if you’re already curious, you can find out more here.
MAINTENANCE
Website maintenance taking up your time? Leave it to us. We’ll keep your WordPress website running smoothly so you can focus on what matters to you.
Everything you need
Our monthly maintenance package offers essential, day to day support.
– Support time per month
– Daily offsite backups
– WordPress updates
– WordPress plugin updates
– Daily security scans
– Daily Performance Scans.
– Versioned & Dependency Managed Code Base
– Staging / Test Site Access
– Uptime Monitoring
– Jira Access
Optional extras
Depending on what your website needs, you may want to take a look at these add-ons.
Sentry Application Monitoring (+ from £60/month)
Sentry allows us to more closely monitor errors in your project, almost every error will be reported back to the service for monitoring and management. It is a useful diagnostic tool but not always needed.
New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring (+ from £30/month)
In cases where a site is continually responding slowly or has unexplained downtime we will recommend the use of New Relic it is simulate to Sentry but acts on the Infrastructural and process level instead of a the application level. It provides information of processes running on the server, how long they take to complete and how different services are interacting.
HOW IT WORKS
From unused hours to billing, and everything inbetween
Rolling Over Unused Hours
Unused hours will roll over to the next month. This is limited to 50% of your prepaid amount. Ie if you have 3 hours pre-paid you can rollover a maximum of 1.5 hours in a month. The maximum amount of rolled over hours is 100% of the pre-paid hours. Ie. If you have 3 hours prepaid you can have a maximum of 3 hours rollover.
Billing
Your prepaid amount will be invoiced and billed via Direct Debit through GoCardless. This is due on the 1st of every month.
Overage hours will be billed via invoice to be paid within 14 days term. The invoice will usually be calculated on the first Friday after the end of the month.
Response times
We aim to respond to critical issues (site inaccessible, payments not working, other critical system problems) immediately. By at least confirming the issue.
High priority issues will be dealt with in 2 days.
Medium and low will be collected and actioned towards the end of the month.
For non-critical issues we tend to try and process them towards the end of the month. We like to keep time available to resolve emergencies so weight your work towards the end of the month as this prevents unexpected large overages. This policy is flexible, as requirements may be urgent but this is our default status.
Issue management
We will use the project management system “Jira” to track progress and assignments on issues. Plus QA and acceptance. We are always trying new project management systems and may change this set up at anytime.
Jira is also integrated with our time tracking system, Harvest. They are tightly integrated for reporting.
Jira handles collecting data, managing process, managing acceptance, communication and time tracking. All decisions on action must be recorded in Jira.
Nominated People
Contact between companies will be primarily between nominated persons. On PBC’s side this will be Stewart Ritchie, the Director of the company. We will notify you with 6 weeks notice should this contact change.
We require 6 weeks notice from your side to successfully manage any hand over.
Cancellation
We request two months notice of cancellation. We will do our best to facilitate as easy a transition as possible. Transition time will be billed at your overage rate.
Work Hours & Bank Holidays
Our normal hours of operation are 9:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday. Support hours used outside of this time period will count at 1.5x billing rate. Unless otherwise arranged in writing with us.
If you need support on a Bank Holiday or other national holiday this will also be charged at the 1.5x billing rate.
Account Management – Reviewing
We aim to review with you every 3 months. This review will cover updates to workflow, the amount of pre-purchased hours you are buying and updates from within your team that we need to know about.
From these we can make a plan about moving everything forward. We’re keen to help strategically as well, not just keeping it up but actively helping to improve these sites. Our goals would be to make the management of these sites as stress free for you as possible, we know you’re a small team with plenty of work to do.
PROCESSES
How we’ll keep things ticking along nicely
Getting Started
Get everything confirmed and setup. Contracts, Billing, Contracts, Access etc. Kickoff call to get everyone aligned, make sure we understand your goals know how we can help you.
We get access to your existing site(s) servers, code based etc. We migrate you to a test site on our hosting.
We test your site and once all is good, flip the switch and take over all of the hosting. You are set up on Jira and we create your first “Sprint”
The Day to Day
We get to work fixing bugs, adding features and making improvements. You’ll get a message from Jira asking you to approve work or that we need more input on the task.
You approve the changes made and we deploy to production. Issues and Tasks move across boards from “ToDo” to Done
Reporting Issues, Bugs and Requesting Changes
Login to Jira and create a new Issue with the Issue Type (Bug, Task, Change Request), Priority (High, Medium, Low) and Severity (Critical, Normal, Low) We review and accept the issue, or ask any follow ups If the issue is severe enough or with a high enough priority we will alter your Sprint to cover it, if not we will put it into the “Backlog” for an upcoming sprint.
Management & Reporting
At the start of the month you will get a report on your hours used in the last month We will work with you to take items from the backlog and prioritise them for action this month. We will review how many hours you are using, and your upcoming needs every quarter.
Technical
For sites with active development or support we place the project under version control and setup automated deployments. Then we create a staging/test copy of the site for demoing and QA with local development versions for each person that may have to work from the site.
The production branch in never touched, it must always mirror what is currently deployed to production incase we need to make a quick fix for the production site.
This process is broadly based on a talk that Stewart gave at WordCamp London a few years ago – WordPress TV – WordPress DevOps for Beginners
WordPress + Plugin Updates
WordPress Plugin updates are usually done weekly, on a Monday Morning.. WordPress Core updates are done on a variable timescale Minor version increases are usually done in 2 days (eg 4.8.8 -> 4.8.9) but with major updates we wait a week to make sure there are no critical issues that have been introduced (eg 4.8.9 -> 4.9.0). You may be using a web host that manages updates for you. We will either supervise their updates of disable this functionality and manage ourselves.
Hours
We suggest that we split the hours purchased into two distinct budgets, support and enhancement. Support to be used for fixes, small changes, management and emergencies. Enhancement hours to be used through the month for making the needed updated and improvements to the site. We separate these to make sure that enhancements continue to happen, even if the site has needed a lot of support through the month.
In this case, based off our preliminary conversations with the FX team we have suggested a total of 5 Days to be retainer monthly, 2 support and 3 enhancement/development. This is a suggested starting point and can be adjust up or down as needed.
Overages to your pre-paid hours will be billed at £95/hour + VAT. Additional hours can be purchased in advance at £80/hour +VAT.Your level of retained support time will be reviewed with you quarterly to make sure you aren’t paying more than you need to regularly.
