The George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine’s original website design was done in WordPress but in a very convoluted and awkward manner. Custom Post Types and Custom Fields were used extensively, along with a set of customised page templates in an old-style theme. The page content wasn’t IN the WordPress pages at all, but in HTML code in the PHP page templates.This verged on being a systematic effort by the original designer to eradicate the ease of use for which WordPress is renowned. Aside from that, the site was not mobile-friendly either…
The upshot was that it was extremely difficult/impossible for staff to easily edit content, particularly in the Staff bio section. The website redesign brief was to extract all the content from the previous configuration and make it readily accessible for editing.
The 1st redesign implementation used the WP Jumpstart design theme base to solve functional issues, and a systematic replacement of old images along with new images was done to illustrate pages, posts, services, treatments etc.
- The site was transferred to hosting with Litespeed Server for the fastest load times
- A full page load speed exercise was done, using Force Regenerate Thumbnails, Shortpixel, WP Rocket Cache etc.
- HTTPS / SSL was implemented, and the new site was both fast to load and easy to use
4 years later, the 2nd redesign in 2023 was to the Generatepress platform, one of the fastest-loading themes available. GP makes it easy to achieve excellent performance scores in Google’s page speed insight tests.
In 2024/55 as part of a major SEO project, we revised the display of Services and People which were built in Custom Post Types. This was done with Kadence Blocks Pro.
Page last Updated on 28th February 2025 by the author Ben Kemp