Not WordPress Themes. Full Blueprints.

PeakZebra brings you ready-to-rock WordPress starter sites.

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Here are our two first blueprints, with more coming each week!

VideoHelp

Store a library of videos, perhaps help for your customers, linkable (with limited authentication) from within your application, if you like.

LiveLetter

The perfect site for running a free/premium newsletter. It’s Substack, but with a platform you own and without 10% being siphoned off the top of your revenues.

A PeakZebra site blueprint comes with things like user signup, payment, and subscription management already installed.

See demo site
Book Zoom call for admin-side demo

Stuff that does stuff…

When a user signs up on your newsletter site (to continue with that example), things happen, because tools like Paid Membership Pro are already loaded when you get your site.

When a great plugin does the job, we use it. When there’s no plugin, we supply our own.

The signup form in the screenshot above does things you don’t get with run-of-the-mill forms, like create subscriber user accounts and free-level memberships in Paid Memberships Pro. If your user pushes the slider over to choose the premium version of your newsletter, they’re sent to a full signup and payment form with their name and email address prefilled.

Oh, and it’s a WordPress “block,” so you can insert copies of this form wherever you need them on your site.

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We’re adding new blueprints all the time.

Right now, we are getting started with just our fantastic newsletter blueprint. Which gives you a platform you own and control, rather than a service that skims a percentage off your revenue. And that can change its deal whenever it wants.

If a newsletter site’s not what you’re after, though, be in touch. We may have what you need already well in the works and we’d love to launch that new blueprint with you involved.

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We facilitate change. If you want to make your own changes to your site, hey, that’s the WordPress idea.

But if not, we have a full queue system to handle your needs at a flat, controlled cost. Because we’re working on sites that where we built the originals, we’ve optimized our request fulfillment for speed and lower-than-agency costs.

Get started See the change request menu

We do harder stuff too.

We’ll always work with you if you need to order something that’s off the menu. We’ll talk through your needs, then put together a quote for the project that’s well in line with current WordPress development rates.

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What can you modify? Here’s the menu…

  • Change color in site palette
  • Specific element color
  • Button behavior
  • Change post template
  • General design change not otherwise listed
  • Design image or element change
  • Position adjustment
  • Reorder elements on a page
  • Design new page
  • Change which meta displays for posts
  • Change text on a page
  • Change image
  • Create new post from provided text
  • Set post feature image
  • Change sticky setting on post
  • Change post meta, including categories
  • Change categories
  • Add new (approved) plugin
  • Change plugin configuration setting
  • Remove (nonessential) plugin
  • Research available plugins for needed functionality
  • Add or Delete Manager account
  • Change session settings such as timeout
  • Set up two-factor authentication (3rd-party fees may apply)

Custom development covers a lot of ground, but what’s covered within the request system are changes to applications built using PeakZebra blocks, with those changes including adding or removing fields from PeakZebra database tables or forms, changes in form design settings, and changing block settings. Other changes are entirely possible but will be handled as separately priced and managed projects.

Current average turnaround time for queued requests: 4:15 business hours.

Hi, I’m Robert…

Senior developer and founder of PeakZebra

PeakZebra is dedicated to helping you start off with a website that’s ready to go. It’s got the parts you need installed. It’s configured. It’s well designed. It’s got little touches of extra functionality built in using PeakZebra custom blocks. Because, yes, it’s done using blocks, the key part of the “new era” of WordPress. Blocks make sense for a lot of reasons, including that:

  • They fit seamlessly into the normal content creation workflow
  • They are inherently “drag-and-drop” — for a no-code experience

We host your site and we give you optional access to a change request queue for any further site work that you’d prefer not to do yourself.

I highly recommend!

The approach PeakZebra takes to website development is quite innovative. I chose a template that had general characteristics that appealed to me, and then PeakZebra
tailored that site specifically to my business, based upon my input. The process was very efficient – I’ve never had such a simple, smooth experience with the development of my website. The cost was quite reasonable, and the time it took PeakZebra to have me up and running was quicker than any other site I have ever had developed.

The result was a very creative, professional site. I highly recommend PeakZebra for your website needs
Troy Berberick
Berberick Law

It’s your WordPress site… doing more than you expected.

Pricing: $279 for the blueprint setup, $50/month for hosting. Low, fixed-price subscription for changes and updates thereafter
(if you need the help).

Check out our pricing in full

Talk to us. If the thing you need is a good fit for our blueprint model, we’ll build a new blueprint for you at the normal blueprint cost (rather than charging you for a bespoke site development engagement).

It depends on the specific plugin, but for the most part we are able to use the free version of the plugin and you are always (of course) welcome to upgrade to the premium version of the plugin. In some cases we have agency licenses to premium plugins and can extend use of the plugin to you at no additional cost. At present, no blueprints use plugins where you are required to purchase a separate license for a plugin.

There are also plugins created by PeakZebra in some blueprints. These are yours to use, even if you leave PeakZebra in the future (though you’ll no longer receive automatic updates or support for them).

Yes. Sort of. But first and foremost, you’ll be 100% on your own. You’ll pick your hosting service, you’ll load WordPress and decide what to do about installing a theme. You’ll have to learn how to customize the theme to best represent you and your business. You’ll have to pick the plugins you need, install them, and troubleshoot the almost inevitable problem or three. It can be done, but ask anyone, it’s a steeper learning curve than it looks like at first. At the end of the day, we truly believe we’d be a bargain at two or three times the price. Book a call and we can talk it through with, of course, no obligation.

The traditional way of getting a bespoke website–hiring a freelancer or an agency–is always an option and there are plenty of occasions where it may be the right option for you.

That said, PeakZebra blueprints provide a full solution for the business situations they address, plus the option to tailor the site to your specific needs, all at a cost that is a tiny fraction of hiring an agency. We are confident that any compentent freelancer will cost twice what we do and any full-service agency will cost twice as much again.

Generally speaking, yes. If you have a specific need or strong preference for a particular hosting service, let’s discuss. Generally speaking, our sites will run anywhere, but a large part of what makes us able to offer such affordable pricing is that our systems are specifically tailored to the hosting we provide.

Our hosting is also really good, by the way. And it comes with automatic WordPress, plugin, and theme updates and hands-off automated backups.

We’ll correct and modify anything we’ve done for you that you aren’t happy with, revising things as many times as needed until you’re happy. But there are generally no refunds. Note that our monthly rate is hardly going to risk your financial ruin.

That said, if you work with us on a more complex project that is quoted as a one-off project, our agreement there will include terms for payment and refunds that address the needs of both parties.

A few years ago, WordPress began migrating to an approach to building sites that uses “blocks” to build both the content of pages, headers and footers. It’s like third-party tools called “page builders”–products like Divi, BeaverBuilder, and Elementor–but it’s fully native to WordPress, not an overlay.

Developers can build specialty and custom blocks, so pretty much anything you can imagine as an element in a website could be a custom block. More often than not, there are already several blocks to choose from.

It’s clear that the future of WordPress lies with this block-based approach (which is also often called “Gutenberg,” it’s original project name).

PeakZebra leverages Gutenberg by building blocks that understand data records and application logic. We have a core set of pre-built blocks and we customize them for specific website uses, making the process much faster than developing from scratch.

We use one of the top plugins for each function we are adding to a blueprint, so we’d argue that the plugin we use is a solid choice. We sometimes create specific integrations with the plugins we choose, so we aren’t really able to swap out a particular plugin, unfortunately. Doing so would also undercut the cost advantages we gain by working with systems built from parts that we understand well, including how they interoperate with other parts of a site.

Probably not. If you are using an existing template and it basically does what you want, however, then you can be up and kicking within two weeks or so. The grander your vision, though, the longer it will take, but you may well be running while still making some further changes.

We can give you a much better sense of the time commitment in an initial Zoom call.

Yes, we’d love that. Agencies work with us just like non-agency clients, with each site that uses a blueprint licensed at the regular rate. If you have multiple sites with us, the queue subscription works a bit differently and gives you extra control over the level of our engagement. There are details, a few at least, so give us a yell and let’s talk.

Absolutely, and we’ve got a specific SaaS blueprint for that. We also have a set of application-building blocks that we can custom tailor for your application (though this may require a separate development engagement, depending on what you’re building). WordPress is a fantastic choice for many SaaS businesses, because it’s easily (and inherently) multi-tenant, handles authentication and user account management, and has tried-and-true options for key functionality like membership, course management, and ecommerce. So let’s talk and see how well we mesh with your project. If nothing else, we can probably give you some (free) guidance on how to approach what you’re doing in WordPress.

Actually, yes. We even have a pretty fancy system (proprietary) for managing the process. We change (where needed) the code for individual clients. But we also propagate changes to the main line of the code (patches, feature additions) to the individual client’s modified version. Crazy, right?

Short answer: they are secure.

Longer answer: they are secure for a couple of important reasons. The first is that WordPress is secure. Sure, the platform gets criticism because you do hear about WordPress sites getting hacked here and there. But remember that WordPress powers 40% of the Internet’s sites, so the target is huge and it includes sites that aren’t up to date and use less-than-convincing add-ons. But a lot of big sites (Whitehouse.gov, to take one example) trust it’s security.

Second, PeakZebra chooses plugins with good security track records. For our custom programming, we do the work with security in mind from the outset. We’re not aware of any other WordPress plugin or theme software that offers this capability. Finally, we perform our own scanning of site internals on a regular basis to ensure that key files haven’t been tampered with and we use the WordFence security plugin to add additional security.

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