For examples of some of the websites I’ve designed and built over the past 14 years, please visit my portfolio list.

About 75% of the sites I do these days are back-ended by WordPress – essentially, designing and coding custom WordPress themes to deliver sites to clients, even when they have not said “I’d like a WordPress site, please.”

Most clients approach a designer with a very vague specification – “I’d like it to look a bit like this” or “here’s our brochure” for example. Working with WordPress has several advantages for the client, namely:

• It’s free, so there is no charge for a content management system (CMS).
• Having a CMS means the client can do updates in-house, without having to pay a developer for maintenance.
• It’s fast – WordPress uses a templating system – so the development time is quicker and the client costs are lower.
• WordPress outputs fairly clean, tableless CSS, which is the current web standard for accessibility and is search engine friendly.
• It is very easy to use – every client I’ve ever worked with has been comfortable with a custom user guide and an hour of training on the phone. That’s hard to beat.

For larger projects WordPress won’t scale to and for award-winning ecommerce sites, I dish out Django and a proprietary shopping system. This tends to be more labor-intensive and requires more than an hour of client training, but there is virtually no kind of content Django can’t be bludgeoned into delivering.