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How this site is built

A note on what powers this site — the case-study portfolio you’re currently reading. Hand-built, on purpose.

Platform

• WordPress 6.x as the content engine. Block themes, Full Site Editing, no page builders.
• Custom block theme — every block on this site (project hero, work archive, narrative deck, lead form, final CTA, services hub, platform hero) is hand-built. Zero pre-made themes from ThemeForest. Zero Elementor, Divi, or Bricks.
• ACF Pro for project meta-fields (industry, year, role, platform, screenshots, headline metric).

Front-end

• CSS custom properties drive the entire design system — tones, spacing scale, radius scale, motion easings. No Sass. No Tailwind.
• Vanilla JavaScript for interactivity — phase tracker, work-archive filtering, scroll-driven reveals. No React, no jQuery.
• CSS scroll-driven animations (animation-timeline: view()) for reveal effects where supported. Graceful fallback elsewhere.
• Container queries for the device-trio hero scroll-loop math.

Typography

• Display: a custom-spaced sans-serif for hero numerals and the wordmark.
• Body: a humanist sans for paragraph copy, optimised for screen reading.
• Mono: for eyebrow labels, indices, and platform tags.

Performance

• Lighthouse desktop 99 / mobile 95.
• LCP under 1.5s on a slow-3G connection.
• No render-blocking JavaScript. All JS is deferred or module-loaded.
• Images served as img with explicit width/height to prevent layout shift.

Accessibility

• Semantic HTML5 throughout — article, section, nav, aside used as intended.
• prefers-reduced-motion respected for every animation.
• Keyboard navigation works on every interactive element.
• Color contrast meets WCAG AA on all text.
• Image alt text is meaningful (not decorative) where the image carries information.

Hosting

WordPress core + custom theme on a managed-WP host. CDN-cached static assets. Daily off-site backups.

What this site is not

• Not a WordPress.com Premium site.
• Not built on Astra / Kadence / Hello Theme + Elementor.
• Not a clone of an Awwwards template.
• Not generated by AI page builders.

If you’re curious about the build

The technical decisions made here are the same kind I make on client projects — that’s the entire point of the portfolio. If you want to walk through specifics, book a call.