It’s been a year since we last updated the Lakewood site, we wanted to give the site a cleaner look and go back to the classic navigation and ultimately focus on the services and SEO. Another big reason for the redesign was to restructure the services we offer with Lakewood. With the addition of CloudCanvas and WP Helper Lakewood started to take more of a backseat role and this allowed us to refocus the main services. Now that
Now that WordPress support and maintenance is handled by WP Helper and low-cost to mid-range WordPress web design is within the CloudCanvas brand we could move our focus to WordPress consultancy and SEO services, these are services we have been providing for years but they have always been part of an overall project rather than an individual service on offer.
Our old site didn’t focus on these services in themselves and we felt that the user experience of our old site also needed a bit of cleaning up. We stripped back all the unnecessary elements and started with a clean sheet with the 2017 redesign, the site is actually based on the Uncode theme, breaking our tradition of coding our own site. We made this decision for a number of reasons, first was to speed things up, coding a WordPress theme similar to Uncode would have taken months. The second was quality, Uncode had all the features we needed and is very well coded and most importantly its fast. As Uncode isn’t a linear theme we rebuild parts of it specifically for our needs and didn’t have the issue of our site looking like many other Uncode sites. Using a prebuild theme to use as a framework is a great example of the power of WordPress, so much money can be saved by making such a move and this money can be invested in SEO, infrastructure and content.
You may notice compared to our 2016 website the new site is very minimal, we opted for this style primarily due to enhancing ease of use and reducing page load speeds. We have added a lot of thought to the above the fold content and delayed image loading. This way the content is available much faster, one of the features we love the most about Uncode is the adaptive images, this is something WordPress introduced a while back to improve load times on mobile devices by serving different size images for each screen size. Uncode does the same thing but slightly better, Uncode defers the loading of the full-size images until the page is fully loaded. The full-size images are loaded asynchronously meaning the page can load much quicker and a lower resolution image is used as a placeholder until the full-size image has loaded completely.
Please leave your thoughts on our new site below.
You can still have a look at the 2016 site by clicking here. See how we have changed over the years on the WayBack Machine.
