Say No to boring WordPress dashboards!

So you spent a good time of your week designing and developing a website for an important client and you’re very thrilled about how it has shaped up. Your site is ready and live and your client is already highly impressed with the work you’ve done. But you still wish you could take it a notch or two up. Well, in this article, we’ll show 3 ways how you can do that and make your way into the good-books of your client, for them to rave your skills about.

As a WordPress development company in Mumbai, we’ve spoken to a fair number of business owners wanting a website. Either that or they already have a website and wish to revamp it completely. Every time a website is delivered, we put in a lot of thought to make it personal. Personalization goes a long way and the client truly feels that he is getting his money’s worth of work. As a web developer, your job is to make a client feel happy. Not just with your technical skills but also with the ability to connect them with the product that you’ve just sold.

A great way to do that is to simply customize the WordPress admin dashboard and give it a great lift-up. It isn’t that hard to do and will not consume much time either, but the payoff is really satisfying. We’ll look at 3 different ways on how you can go about doing it and by the end of this article you will have enough resources to blow your client away – in a good way, of course!

1. Personalize the WP login screen

This is such an easy thing to do but we hardly get to see it. Whenever you have a WordPress instance installed, it’ll come with its default login screen that we usually see. It has the WordPress logo and the login credentials fields against the very bland, very clichéd gray colored background.

However, things can change for the better. You can either go the hard way and get your hands dirty by coding like the geek that you are – which will involve using a fair amount of custom CSS and change the header files to make it look the way you desire. Or you can make use of a great plugin to do all the heavy weight lifting for you.

The plugin that I recommend is called LoginPress. This plugin is easily found in the WordPress repository and can be easily downloaded and tinkered with to change the default WordPress background and logo to anything that you desire. This means bright colors or a photo background along with the client’s personal brand logo. Think about how amazing the login page will look henceforth!

2. Remove the clutter

If you’ve built any WordPress website, then you’d know the backend can get extremely busy and cluttered. Speaking from experience as a web development company, we know! Even for seasoned WordPress developers, it can get a bit tedious to find your way around it if the project demands a lot of plugins to be used to lend the website the functionality it requires. Having a lot of plugins can be a very stressful time for business owners who want to take a peak there and things can quickly get very overwhelming looking at the sheer number of plugins installed.

A great way to overcome this issue is to remove all the unnecessary plugins (if any) to free up space. It will give a much cleaner overall look to the admin area and look a lot less intimidating. Your clients will definitely love how the area looks more organized than it was earlier.

If you are a WordPress developer with a valid fear of clients experimenting too much in the WP admin area that may bring about a catastrophic event on the site’s usability, a great way to avoid that is by using a very useful plugin called Admin Menu Editor. This plugin is very easy to use and it will help you hide some menu items from the dashboard. It’s a clever way to ensure your clients do not venture where they don’t need to be and at the same time give them enough space to play around with the site and get a little familiar.

3. Go fully custom

Nothing will be more pleasing to your clients than to see a fully customized (and personalized) WordPress dashboard. Wouldn’t you want to set a personalized welcome message every time your client logs in to his site? What about having widgets that are completely customized for the project in hand? If you are struggling to find a solution to how you can achieve such functionality, there is an amazing plugin that will help you get the desired elements together.

It’s called the White Label CMS plugin. This nifty plugin does a lot of custom work that would have otherwise taken hours to accomplish. It can change the dashboard area to reflect the site’s branding such as logo and colors, it can help you add the necessary widgets that will provide a snapshot of the site’s performance right on the dashboard, you can also use a page builder template and use it on the dashboard for anything you desire – such as an FAQ section. It also provides you a separate HTML area that you can utilize to display photos and videos (such as training videos to help you non-technical client get around the site).

This is a fantastic way to add more personality to the otherwise drab looking WordPress dashboard. By having thoughtfully created widgets such as FAQs or a training video section, you save yourself a lot of time instead of having to repeat yourself to your client every time they run into some trouble.

I hope you have a fair idea of how to build your WP dashboard with cleverly designed widgets and incorporate your client’s branding to give a more sophisticated look to the entire website.