WordPress front-end work, without the template look

It runs a large share of the web for a reason: your team probably already knows it, every content person has used it, and the editing model is familiar enough that nobody needs training to publish a post.

Where it goes wrong is the purchased theme with forty options nobody uses, a page builder stacked on top, and a site that loads two megabytes to show a paragraph. A custom template removes all three.

Theme templates, the markup, the styles and the front-end behaviour: that is the work. It usually means a design becoming a set of templates on a site that is already running, rather than a greenfield platform build.

Custom plugins, server-side application logic, membership systems and payment flows are outside what I take on. On projects that need them I build the front end and work with your WordPress developer, and I will say which side of that line a request falls on at the brief stage.

The templates are built so that editing content cannot destroy the layout: fields and blocks for the parts that change, fixed structure for the parts that should not.

It is the boring constraint that keeps a site looking designed a year later, when four different people have added pages and nobody remembers what the original rules were.