Website Development

A website has one job. It takes someone who does not know your business and turns them into someone who calls, books or pays. Most sites do the first part and stop.

I build custom WordPress sites by hand. No page builder, no bought template. Design, code, integrations and deployment are all mine.

What usually goes wrong

One kind visibly hurts you: slow, dated, broken on a phone, or missing entirely because the business lives on a social profile.

The other kind looks fine and captures nothing. The form may not deliver mail, there is no way to book, and nobody can say which pages bring in work. The causes repeat: a theme nobody can safely edit, plugins doing work that should be twenty lines of code, unoptimized images, and a domain never set up to send authenticated mail.

What I build differently

I write the theme. One was a custom PHP theme on the native WordPress template hierarchy, another a Full Site Editing block theme with tokens in theme.json. The palette, type scale and spacing live in one place, so a brand color change is a single edit. Content you update often gets a custom post type, so you fill in normal fields.

The case against page builders

Page builders are not evil, and I will say plainly when one is right. For a simple site on the smallest budget, a builder is reasonable.

Here is what they cost when the site matters. A builder ships a lot of code to every visitor so it can draw any layout, and the visitor pays in load time. Your pages live in the builder’s format, not plain WordPress content, so when the plugin raises its price or gets abandoned, your site comes along.

People assume a hand-built theme is harder to edit. It is the opposite. In a builder you drag boxes and hope nothing shifts. In mine, text is text in a plain field.

What a build can include

• Booking and payment. Moovs and Stripe integrated so a visitor books and pays online, in the Open Ways Transportation booking build.
• Lead capture. Nonce protected handlers, server side sanitization, Reply-To threading, multi-recipient delivery, clear error states.
• Email that arrives. Authenticated SMTP with DKIM, SPF and DNS records written and verified.
• Automation. MailerLite API integration with tagged segmentation and a nurture sequence.
• Custom tools. A 25 question scored self assessment on its own database table, no paid quiz plugin, in the LS Business Management lead generation build.
• Measurement. GA4 with a dataLayer event layer and de-duplicated conversions through Google Tag Manager.
• Search groundwork. Hand authored JSON-LD, per page titles and meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, 301 redirects.
• Performance. WebP conversion through a Node.js and sharp pipeline, lazy loading, cache busting by file modification time. On one project this cut image payload from 2,612 KB to 362 KB, down 86 percent.
• Bilingual sites. I have shipped a Portuguese first site with TranslatePress.

How a project runs

• Conversation. What the business does and what a visitor should do.
• Scope. Pages, existing content, what needs writing, which integrations are in.
• Design system. Palette, type and spacing agreed as tokens first.
• Build on staging. A clone, never your live site.
• Testing. Forms, booking, payments, email and analytics, end to end.
• Launch. Git tagged release, WP-CLI deploy over SSH with no downtime, documented rollback.
• Handover. You get shown how to edit your content.

Who this is for

Small businesses that earn real money from their website, or should. I am based in Lakewood Ranch, work across Manatee and Sarasota counties in person, and take remote projects anywhere in the US. IT providers and agencies without a developer can hire me to build under their name.

Who this is not for

If you need a five page brochure site next week at the lowest price, I am not your best option, and I will say so.

If you run an ecommerce catalog with thousands of SKUs and warehouse integration, you want a team, not one developer.

If you want guaranteed rankings, traffic or revenue, nobody can honestly promise those.

Common Questions

Can I edit the website myself after it is built?

Yes. Text, images, services and similar content are edited in normal WordPress fields and custom post types, with the design applied automatically. You do not touch code or arrange layout boxes, and I walk you through the site at handover. New features are developer work, but daily updating is yours.

What happens to my current site and domain during a rebuild?

Your existing site stays live and untouched throughout, because I build on a separate staging clone. You keep your domain. At launch I deploy the new site and put 301 redirects in place so old links and search results still land in the right spot, with a documented rollback.

Who owns the code and the site when the project is finished?

You do. The theme, the custom code, the content and the hosting account are yours, and I hand over the credentials. Nothing is locked to a license only I can renew, and no proprietary editor needs paying for. If another developer takes over, they get a normal WordPress site.

Can I start small and add more later?

Yes, and that is often the sensible order. A first phase can be core pages, working lead capture and analytics. Booking, payments, an assessment tool, automation or a second language come afterward. Because the design lives in central tokens and content sits in custom post types, later phases extend the site rather than replace it.