Development Environment

• The site will be built on a development domain on servers that Visions control.
• The site will be protected by a .htaccess generated .htpassword (password prompt) – so the site will not be publically accessible or crawled by search engines such as Google. This is additionally enforced by a nofollow/noindex robots tag across all pages of the development or staging site.
• Access to the code will be given if requested via a GIT Repository. Our standard procedure includes disabling WordPress’s default theme editor and ‘Add New Plugins’ feature for security and continuity. We manage code changes in a structured and effective manner utilising CI/CD Pipelines that includes automated testing and deployments. 

Coding Guidelines

• Visions will use HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript (utilising the latest version of the jQuery framework and on request additional JS libraries).
• The CSS will be generated using SCSS.
• All SCSS will be modular and well-commented.
• CSS and JS will be concatenated and compressed for production where possible.
• We use NPM for our front-end development workflow.
• All original PHP, SCSS, JS and Package JSON files will be packaged up and supplied, if you wish.

WordPress Theme Guidelines

• The theme will be custom-coded, we do not use pre-built premium themes (i.e. Themeforest). 
• We will not modify any WordPress core files or Plugin files.
• Where possible, the theme will be built as a Flexible Content page builder, using ACF Pro (and Gutenberg if requested).

All of our WordPress themes are custom coded and built using ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), which allows us to give the client complete flexibility and scalability.

Before the introduction of Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0, WordPress came with a single standard WYSIWYG content area. Now to give clients full control over their page designs, we implemented Flexible Content, effectively creating a page builder composed of pre-defined blocks. Watch the following video for a demonstration of this approach:

• We will make all pages and posts editable.
• We will make all global elements editable in ‘Theme Options’
• We will ensure all menus are editable via WordPress Appearance > Menus (unless a custom mega-menu whereas this will be edited in ‘Theme Options’.
• WordPress Comments will be disabled and not included in the build unless we are told to do so specifically, we hate spam and want to reduce the possibility of receiving any via the website.

WordPress Plugins

We include the following plugins in our builds:

• ACF Pro
• WPRocket
• WPForms
• Wordfence
• Yoast SEO
• Cookie Law Info
• Google Site Kit
• SVG Support

If you would like any other plugins included (or for example; to use other plugins instead of the above i.e. Contact Form 7 instead of WPForms) please let us know and ensure it is listed on the quotation. Further plugins will also be add-able via the CMS on the release of the build.

Testing (QA) Guidelines

• We will check the website matches the signed off designs, including any supplied mobile designs
• Using BrowserStack will check that the website works in all major browsers: the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and for Edge (We do not offer Internet Explorer support by default.). If you would like further browser support please let us know and ensure it is listed in your quotation.
• We will check the website works on a selection of the latest devices including tablets and phones. We will test at all sizes from the first responsive break-point.
• We will check the website validates in W3C where possible.
• We will check the website has been developed with best practices including image optimisation, compression and concatenation and workable code (so external developers can easily work with the code).

If YOU want to host the website.

• We can/will send the files and MYSQL database backup via a resource such as Dropbox, Google Drive or WeTransfer.