Our Standards

Vendor lock-in is one of the most significant frustrations in the marketing and web world. Open source, by contrast, promotes technology and code that continually benefits the people building and using the web. WordPress is open source by nature, and working with Illustrate Digital reflects that same philosophy.

Everything we build is designed to be usable by your organisation beyond any engagement with our team. You’re never locked into our particular way of developing or reliant on proprietary tools. Every developer at Illustrate Digital is here because they believe in the value and impact of open source principles.

When a project ends, everything you need belongs to you. The code, the repository, the documentation, the WordPress installation itself. Where we incorporate our own background IP into a build, the things we’ve developed over time that help us work more efficiently and to a higher standard, you receive a full licence to operate it without any obligation to remain a client. We don’t use proprietary systems as a retention mechanism.

In practice this means you receive full access to your codebase and hosting environment, and our work is documented clearly enough that another competent development team could pick up where we left off if needed. This isn’t just good ethics; it’s consistent with our open source principles and, frankly, it’s the standard any agency should be held to. We just think it’s worth saying plainly.

Protecting your data and your reputation is fundamental to the way we operate. The foundation of our approach to security is our ISO 27001 certification for information security management, which requires independent yearly audits and holds us accountable to the high standards we set as an organisation. Day to day, we maintain an active risk profile for each website under our care.

Alongside regular backups, ongoing monitoring, and scheduled testing, our team meets daily to review worldwide vulnerabilities in WordPress and the tools we use, ensuring we stay ahead of potential risks to uptime and data security before they have a chance to become your problem.

When auditing websites built by other agencies, one of the most common issues we encounter is a lack of adherence to coding standards. As a leading WordPress agency, it goes without saying that we follow the official WordPress Coding Standards (you can find out more about those here). In practice we hold ourselves to an enhanced version of those standards.

These form the basis of our internal peer reviews and feed directly into our quality assurance process. They cover principles including clear and consistent code commenting, regular commits to a code repository, clean and considered code structure, and the use of WordPress’s core development features rather than unnecessary workarounds.

We take the quality of our work seriously, not least because no developer wants to do their work twice, but more importantly because high standards are simply what you should expect from a world-class WordPress agency.

Depending on the scale of a project or task, we draw on a combination of internal and external QA options. For larger bodies of work, all quality assurance is processed externally by a dedicated QA agency, which serves as an additional layer of scrutiny beyond peer review. There’s a meaningful difference between being quality-checked by a third party and being checked by a colleague, and that difference matters.

Our QA processes are also underpinned by our ISO 9001 certification for quality management, with yearly audits to ensure our processes and deliverables continue to meet that standard. You can find out more about our ISO 9001 certification at the link below.

A fast website isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a baseline expectation. Every website we build or maintain is developed with Core Web Vitals as a benchmark, targeting the thresholds that Google and modern browsers use to assess real-world user experience.

Beyond raw speed, we consider sustainability as part of performance: the carbon footprint of a website is an increasingly common procurement requirement, particularly in public sector and financial services, and it’s something we factor into how we build. Where performance targets are agreed as part of a project, we test and validate against them before anything goes live, not after.

A usable, inclusive website isn’t something that should need to be briefed in. It should simply be expected. All production at Illustrate Digital adheres to WCAG guidelines, as well as complying with the requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

We also have a proprietary diagnostic tool and audit process specifically designed to help organisations meet the requirements of the EAA before its enforcement deadline. You can find that diagnostic tool here.

Genuine usability in the modern world requires accounting for the full range of devices your audience might use. Whether that’s a mobile-first experience designed for smaller screens, a richer desktop environment, or the careful balance required for tablets and multi-screen usage, device compatibility is central to how we approach design.

We design and test across a range of device types and screen sizes to ensure your website is as usable and accessible as possible, wherever your audience happens to be.

One of the most common frustrations we hear from organisations who’ve worked with other agencies is not about the quality of the work, it’s about being kept in the dark. At Illustrate Digital, the people you speak to are the people doing the work. There are no account manager layers, no walls between you and the expertise you’re paying for. We operate defined response and action times across all support categories, and our team meets daily to review anything that might affect the websites in our care.

For clients on retainer, regular check-ins are built into the relationship as standard, not scheduled reactively when something goes wrong. Good communication isn’t a soft skill we mention in pitches; it’s a process we hold ourselves accountable to.