Many web designers offer “WordPress” as a solution. The information below can help you understand if I’m a good choice for your project.
Confession time: I’m actually a front-end developer. Though I have expertise developing websites using WordPress as the backbone, my skill set is based in best-practice modern front-end development. This means I can offer more resilient solutions than a typical web design or marketing agency offering WordPress as an option.
Generally, I’m the type of front-end developer focused mostly on things like “interaction design & SVG, CSS/SASS architecture, WordPress themes, UX and accessibility.” Despite this, I’m well-grounded in modern JavaScript and tooling: from vanilla to Vue; webpack to Docker.
Being heavily invested in WordPress as a CMS means I’ve worked with PHP a lot—and, increasingly, React-flavoured JavaScript for custom blocks—with occasional trips to the more structured lands of Laravel & Lumen. I use Composer and write unit tests on occasion.
My primary activity involves bridging the gap between technology and design. However, due to the small scale of the projects I work on, all previous WordPress projects linked from this site have been “designed” by myself.
90 per hour or 450 per day.
90 per hour.
75 per hour for WordPress, theme, and plugin updates.
25% discount for choosing to create a more accessible website.*
120 per hour for maintenance on a WordPress-powered website using a 3rd-party editing tool (i.e. not a native WordPress editor).†
All prices are New Zealand dollars.
* New projects only, please see “So, what is accessibility?” for more information.
† The reason for the increased rate is simple: page builder tools and the themes that typically utilise them offer a huge variety of layout options and presets. This is an attractive selling point and makes for an easy “feel good” purchase, but, for this reason, it helps defer important decisions around what is the best approach for your specific project. The result is usually a mess behind-the-scenes. Long-term, with these themes you are buying into a large codebase of which the majority is redundant. This is a great example of what is termed "technical debt" because the large redundant part still needs to be accounted for when any remedial work is performed.
It’s true, this site is built on Jekyll (2014–2017); Hugo (2017–2020); Eleventy! WordPress can be a great all-purpose solution but it’s not my default go-to option.
The promise of a content management system (CMS) like WordPress is the ability to easily update website content. The trade-off here is a CMS is powered by a bunch of code connected to a database, all of which needs regular ongoing maintenance.
One of the first things to consider is whether WordPress is a good option for your project.