There are a lot of ways to build a WordPress website.
Some are quick. Some are cheap. Some make life wonderfully easy for the person building the site — and leave the business owner with a slow, bloated mess to deal with a few years later.
At bunnyduck.design, we’re far more interested in what happens after your website launches.
Will it be fast?
Will it be easy to expand?
Will Google be able to understand it properly?
Can we add new services, locations and functionality without rebuilding the whole thing?
And, most importantly, will it actually help turn more of your visitors into customers?
That’s a big part of the reason we now build our WordPress websites using Etch.
What is Etch?
Etch is a modern visual development environment for WordPress.
That’s a slightly nerdy way of saying that it gives us the speed and flexibility of a visual website builder, while allowing us to create websites much more like they would be built by a traditional developer.
Instead of relying on layer upon layer of proprietary widgets and unnecessary code, Etch lets us work directly with real HTML, CSS, WordPress data and modern web-development techniques.
For our clients, that means we can build highly bespoke WordPress websites without sacrificing performance, structure or maintainability.
And that’s the bit we care about.
We don’t choose a website builder because it’s easy
There are plenty of WordPress page builders that can make producing a website incredibly quick.
That isn’t necessarily the same thing as producing a good website.
When we choose the tools we use at bunnyduck.design, we’re looking at the bigger picture.
A website we build today may need another 50 pages added to it over the next few years. It might need new services, new locations, landing pages, integrations, custom content or an entirely new section of the business.
We therefore want to start with a solid foundation rather than designing ourselves into a corner.
Etch gives us that foundation.
Cleaner websites mean better websites
One of the things we particularly like about Etch is its approach to the code behind the page.
Website visitors will never see that code, of course.
But they absolutely experience the consequences of it.
Poorly built websites can end up filled with unnecessary containers, duplicated styles, scripts and builder-specific code. As a website grows, that can make it increasingly difficult to maintain and can contribute to performance problems.
Etch allows us to build using clean, sensible HTML and CSS and gives us proper control over the structure of each page.
That helps us create websites which are:
- Fast
- Lightweight
- Easier to maintain
- Easier to expand
- More accessible
- Better structured for search engines
It isn’t the glamorous part of web design.
But it matters.
Built properly for mobile
A large proportion of your potential customers will visit your website from their phone.
For many local businesses, mobile traffic isn’t just important — it’s the majority of the audience.
So we don’t design a desktop website and then hope it behaves itself when somebody opens it on an iPhone.
We design responsively from the beginning.
Etch gives us precise control over layouts at different screen sizes, allowing us to think properly about things such as button sizes, spacing, typography, navigation and calls to action.
Because a website looking pretty on a 27-inch monitor isn’t much use if somebody standing in a car park with one hand on their phone can’t work out how to contact you.
A proper design system behind every website
Modern websites can become surprisingly large.
You might have dozens of pages containing hundreds of buttons, headings, cards, forms, colours and spacing values.
If every one of those is styled individually, changing the website later becomes unnecessarily difficult.
Etch allows us to create proper global styles, reusable CSS variables and consistent components.
That means something as simple as changing your primary brand colour, adjusting the spacing throughout the website or updating a commonly used element doesn’t require manually editing every page.
It’s a much more professional way of building websites — and it helps keep everything consistent as the site grows.
WordPress without being trapped in a page builder
This is probably one of the biggest reasons we’re excited about Etch.
One of the problems with some WordPress page builders is lock-in.
The content of your website can become heavily dependent on that particular builder. Remove it, and you’re left with a considerable rebuilding job.
Etch takes a very different approach.
The content we create is authored into native WordPress Gutenberg blocks, helping keep the actual content within WordPress rather than burying everything inside a proprietary page-building system.
That matters because your website should belong to you.
We want clients to stay with bunnyduck.design because we’re doing a bloody good job — not because we’ve made it prohibitively difficult for them to leave.
It lets us build around your business
Perhaps the biggest advantage of Etch is simply that it doesn’t dictate what your website has to look like.
We aren’t starting with a theme and changing the colours.
We aren’t scrolling through a library of pre-made sections trying to find one that’s vaguely appropriate.
We can design the website around your business, your customers and what you actually need people to do.
For one business, that might mean generating quote requests.
For another, it might mean getting visitors to phone.
For another, the website may need to explain a complex service, establish trust, showcase previous work or help the company appear for dozens of different Google searches.
The technology should adapt to the strategy — not the other way around.
Etch and SEO
Using Etch won’t magically put a website at number one on Google.
Anyone telling you their website builder will do that is talking rubbish.
What it does give us is an excellent technical starting point.
We can use appropriate semantic HTML, create logical page structures, control headings properly, optimise performance and build pages specifically around the search terms and locations that matter to the business.
All of those things make our job of creating a search-friendly website considerably easier.
The actual SEO still comes from understanding what people are searching for, creating useful pages, building authority and continually improving the website.
But having a well-built site underneath it all certainly helps.
The website builder isn’t really the important bit
Here’s the slightly strange conclusion to an article explaining why we use Etch:
You shouldn’t really need to care what we built your website with.
Most of our clients don’t.
And that’s fine.
You’re paying us because you want more enquiries, better customers, a more professional business or a website that finally represents how good your company actually is.
Etch is simply one of the tools we use to make that happen.
We chose it because it gives us the freedom to design properly, the control to develop properly and the foundations to build websites which can continue growing alongside our clients.
In other words, it helps us build the kind of WordPress websites we want to put the bunnyduck.design name on.
Looking for a better WordPress website?
If your current website is slow, dated, difficult to update or simply isn’t generating enough business, changing a few colours probably isn’t going to solve it.
We design and build bespoke WordPress websites for businesses in Norwich, Norfolk and across the UK, with a strong focus on one thing:
turning more of the right visitors into customers.
If you’d like us to take a look at what you’ve currently got and tell you what we’d change, get in touch.
We need to talk.
Tell us about your business, what isn’t working and where you want to get to.
We’ll work out what your website actually needs to do — and build from there.