Peadig – now part of FireCask

Website Development – What do we do?

At FireCask, we cater for every stage of website development, from branding and design to hosting, maintenance and added security layers.

WordPress custom theme development

We build cutting-edge, custom websites for all sized businesses using WordPress – the most popular open-source CMS out there that powers many of the websites visited every day.

Our WordPress theme development team can build websites of all complexities, whether you’re a consultant looking for a simple website or an e-commerce retailer looking for more complex developments, themes and plugins.

Branding and design

Our website development begins with branding and design. We believe the design process should be a collaborative project between our design team and you.

First things first, our team will get to grips with your brand and what you’d like to achieve, all while exploring the habits and needs of the end-user and aligning your new website to meet them. From here, we can work with your brief to put together a cutting-edge homepage design that follows best UX, UI & design practices, before designing all other pages, utilising the same elements and aesthetic throughout for consistency.

Updating existing websites

Not only do we create new themes for brand new websites, we also work with existing themes to customise and extend their assets. Our team is experienced in working with external APIs as well as creating our own. What’s more, we can look into existing websites and offer improvements from a tech and SEO perspective with the aim of improving a site’s performance.

Onsite SEO

Our website development work doesn’t stop once the site is built. We are a specialist SEO agency and can work with your site to optimise its search engine performance. We build complex SEO features into all of our websites, from schema markup to HREFlang tags. This helps our clients to really stand out from their competitors.

Hosting, Maintenance & Security

We provide ongoing hosting and maintenance support for all of our clients using a dedicated server based in Manchester. We take security very seriously both online and offline and we pride ourselves in keeping up-to-date with the latest security threats and vulnerabilities, taking proactive measures to combat them.

As we develop and host a large number of WordPress websites, our security team go beyond the realms of basic website security. All of our website builds include added security features, from the removal of any unnecessary bloat (such as XML-RPC) to extensive prevention of access to sensitive files (for example, files that could show elements such as server root directories, passwords and usernames).

On a server level, we also implement the following strict security measures:

• No server access via any method to anyone other than to those who require access (reviewed quarterly)
• No access to any server via FTP by anyone
• SFTP access is only available for FireCask team members who absolutely need it
• No direct code changes on any production server
• Git version control and CI pipelines are actively used

Our additional server controls also include active IP address blocking/jailing on a case by case basis. Our hosting provider provides daily backups but we also take additional steps and perform daily backups to secure cloud storage. We can also add additional security headers to prevent potential attacks.