ExaGrid WordPress Website Development
ExaGrid is an enterprise backup hardware company based in Massachusetts. With hundreds of customers and nearly two decades of experience in an industry that is constantly evolving, ExaGrid needed a new website that presented them as experienced service providers with a range of solutions and an emphasis on customer relationships. Their old site was broken, both visually and structurally. The site was built using the Genesis framework and the WordPress back end had many deprecated fields and features that hadn’t been in use since the site was originally developed in 2014.
Furthermore, Genesis’s features were a double-edged sword, as the framework’s broad range of tools made for slow page load times. With so many functions that no longer applied to ExaGrid’s content structure or were never used to begin with, the marketing team was finding it increasingly difficult to edit and update content. In addition to a front end visual overhaul, the company wanted to streamline their back end WordPress experience.
Working from a layered Photoshop design file, I rebuilt the site from the ground-up with the new design, simplifying the experience of creating and editing content in WordPress. Using PHP, Advanced Custom Fields and Zurb Foundation 6, I developed a collection of flexible page templates as well as custom post types for resources and customer case studies with associated archives. Aside from the sheer volume of pages and media to keep organized, this project was a challenge from a development perspective.
I learned new skills and techniques that have been useful in subsequent sites, including permalink structure overrides for custom post types to stay consistent with the old site’s SEO; search functions at different scopes—both site-wide and at the post-type level; how to use custom taxonomies for integrated functionality; and editing parameters of an XML export of custom posts from Genesis to be imported properly into the new site’s post type structure. ExaGrid’s site was a heavy lift from both a coding and management perspective, but it was a great experience that improved my technical skills.
