Building a construction company site on WordPress

Zarhan İnşaat is an architecture, engineering and construction company with offices in Bursa, Erzurum and Istanbul. Their site has one main job: show finished and ongoing projects well enough that a visitor calls one of those offices.

Why WordPress

The company adds projects, renders and references over time, and the people doing that are not developers. A custom stack would have meant building an editor for them; WordPress already is one. Pages are built with a visual page builder on a lightweight theme, so layouts can be edited without touching templates.

Structure

• Home: full-width project slider, a short statement about the company, featured projects, partner logos and the three offices with contact details.
• Corporate: about us and company policy.
• Construction, Contracting & Implementation and Architecture & Engineering: service pages, each with its own project and design galleries.
• References and Partners.
• Contact.

What I would change today

The weak point of most page-builder sites, this one included, is weight. Widget add-ons overlap, and each one loads its own CSS and JavaScript even on pages that use one or two of its widgets. If I rebuilt it now I would:

• Keep add-ons to a minimum, or build the few custom sections as a small theme plugin.
• Serve project images in a modern format at a few fixed sizes, since the galleries are the heaviest part of every page.
• Add per-project pages with a short description and location, which would give search engines more than image galleries to index.

WordPress was the right call for a client who needs to publish images without help. The cost of that convenience is weight, and it pays to keep it under control from the start.