WordPress That Works
Building a WordPress website is not the difficult part these days. The tools are good, they get better every year, and more of the work can be automated. Anyone telling you the code is the hard bit is selling you the wrong thing.
The hard part is knowing what to build. Which decisions still make sense in three years, which ones quietly cost you money, and which ones you shouldn’t make at all. That kind of judgment comes from over 20 years of building websites and then living with them afterwards.
I handle both the design and the build. No handover gap where a developer has to reinterpret a design they had no part in. The finished product reflects the original intent.
Sometimes I’ll Talk You Out of It
WordPress is the right fit for a lot of businesses. It’s genuinely the wrong fit for some.
If your site is a handful of pages, changes rarely, and has no donations, bookings, or logins behind it, WordPress is a lot of machinery to maintain for very little return. Updates, plugin licences, backups, security, and a bill every year for the privilege.
A static build runs faster, costs very little to keep running, and has almost nothing to break or get hacked. If that’s what you need, I’ll say so, and build that instead.
This isn’t turning work away. It’s building the right thing, which is the only version of this job worth doing.
Two Notebook pieces go further: Is WordPress still relevant? and When WordPress isn’t enough.
What I Actually Do
New builds, from a blank page through to launch.
Rebuilds of sites that have grown awkward, slow, or impossible to update without ringing someone.
Migrations, including moving historic content and data across without losing it or breaking every link pointing at it.
Builds from someone else’s design. Bravery Trust and Basketball HQ were both built faithfully from client-supplied Figma prototypes. If the design is settled, I don’t need to redesign it to feel useful.
Making Things Talk to Each Other
Most websites of any substance need to connect to something that isn’t the website. Donations, memberships, bookings, mailing lists, or a CRM somebody chose years ago.
Bravery Trust needed donations flowing through Raisely. Basketball HQ needed memberships and payments handled by PerfectGym. Viridity and Cloudsolve both needed online bookings through Bookeo.
Getting those connections right is usually where a project succeeds or fails. The build looks finished, but if the donation doesn’t reach the CRM or the booking doesn’t reach the calendar, the site isn’t doing its job.
Why I Standardise
Nearly every project is built on the same small set of tools. GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks for the front end, Advanced Custom Fields for structured content.
Not because they’re fashionable, but because I know precisely how they behave, what breaks, and what they’ll cost to run in five years. These tools have a track record of being affordable, well maintained, and secure. Familiarity is worth more than novelty when somebody else has to live with the result.
The full list, hosting through to security, is on the WordPress toolkit page.
Ongoing Support
A website isn’t finished at launch. It just stops being a project.
Things change. WordPress updates, plugins get abandoned, a payment provider changes its terms, someone deletes a page they shouldn’t have. Ongoing support means one person already knows your site and can sort it out, rather than a ticket queue and a fresh explanation every time.
Available as needed, or as a regular arrangement, whichever suits how your organisation actually works.
One-to-One Training
The best outcome is that you don’t need me for the day-to-day.
Training is one-to-one, in plain language, and built around your website rather than a generic WordPress course. We cover adding a page, updating staff profiles, publishing a news item, and uploading images that don’t slow the site to a crawl. Recorded if that helps, so the next person who joins your organisation isn’t starting from scratch.
Schools often fund this from professional development budgets rather than marketing spend, which is worth knowing when you’re costing a project.
Training clients to not need me is a poor business model on paper. But it’s also why most of them are still here years later.
Selected Work
For Agencies and Studios
Agencies and studios also use me as their WordPress developer.
I work to your process and join your standups if you run them. Your client may well know who I am, plenty do, but the relationship stays yours. I don’t pitch, I don’t quote, and I don’t go around you.
No scope creep, no surprises. A site built properly, to your design.
Let’s talk about your next project. Get in touch and we’ll work out what you actually need.