Hi everyone!
I’d really appreciate some advice from people with experience building corporate websites with WordPress.
I recently joined a company in a digital marketing role, and the company is currently going through a rebranding process. I’ve been given the opportunity to take ownership of the new corporate website, and I’ve already created the design myself.
Now I want to move on to the development and implementation phase using WordPress.
I have some previous experience with WordPress. I’ve built a few websites and worked with themes and plugins, but I’ve never developed a website for a company of this size or within a corporate environment.
I’m considering using WordPress Studio together with Claude (Claude Code) to help me build the website and potentially develop a custom theme. However, I’m not sure whether this is a good approach or whether I might end up overcomplicating things, especially when it comes to long-term maintenance and handing the project over to an external agency.
Here are some things I’d particularly appreciate your advice on:
Would you recommend starting with an existing theme (Astra, GeneratePress, etc.), using a Full Site Editing/block theme, or building a completely custom theme with Claude Code?
Is using Claude Code to develop a custom WordPress theme a good idea for this type of project, or could it introduce unnecessary complexity?
Would WordPress Studio be a good development environment, especially if I want to work with a cloud-based workflow?
How can I make sure the website is properly structured and easy for an external agency to take over and maintain?
What should I consider from the beginning regarding reusable blocks, plugins, SEO, performance, responsiveness and compatibility?
What would be the best workflow for development, staging and production?
My intention is to handle the design implementation, website structure, content, reusable blocks and on-page SEO. Later on, an external agency will most likely take over the more advanced technical aspects, such as security, hosting infrastructure, maintenance and further optimisations.
I want to make sure I build something professional, scalable and easy to maintain, rather than creating technical debt that someone else will have to deal with later.
There is also a personal motivation behind this project. I’m still relatively new to the company, and my current salary is quite modest. I see this as an opportunity to demonstrate my skills, take on more responsibility and deliver something tangible that I can use to support a salary review at the beginning of next year.
If you’ve worked on similar corporate WordPress projects, especially using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, I’d love to hear about your experience.
Would you use Claude Code for this project? Would you build everything from scratch or take a more conventional approach?
Any recommendations, resources or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!