The brief
This was my first agency project after going freelance. Christwood — a faith-based Life Plan Community on the Louisiana Northshore — needed a new marketing site translated pixel-for-pixel from professional PSDs, with a three-week deadline and an opinionated brand system to honor: hand-drawn section transitions, color-coded category cards, photography-led layouts, and a built-in text-size adjuster. The audience is 55+. Accessibility wasn’t an afterthought; it was part of the brief.
I was solo on the build, learning the agency’s ACF-based theme tooling and shipping conventions in real time. Plenty of late nights to clear it.
What I built
- A custom component builder on top of Advanced Custom Fields, with a matching sub-builder for sidebar layouts, so editors could compose any page from the same vocabulary — and the codebase stayed dry instead of forking a new template every time marketing needed a new section.
- Hand-rolled SVG masks for the section transitions — the curved, stencil-like dividers between hero, photo grid, and feature blocks aren’t templated tricks; they’re the brand’s voice expressed in code.
- A pixel-perfect translation of the PSDs at every breakpoint the agency cared about: the photography-grid hero, the color-coded “Ready to Explore” cards, the dignified green and teal palette running through every page.
- A persistent text resizer that scales body copy across the site without breaking the grid — practical accessibility for the actual readers.
- PHP and markup that would still read clearly to a developer arriving on the project cold today.
What’s notable about it now
It’s been seven years. Christwood is still running the site I built, on the same infrastructure, with no rebuild and no replacement in sight. They didn’t outgrow the tooling, the layouts didn’t break under content drift, and the editorial controls held up across multiple marketing teams. The longevity is the point — this is what “shipped to last” looks like.
What I’d do differently today
Different stack, same instincts. I’d reach for something static-first instead of WordPress for a marketing site of this shape, and I’d skip Bootstrap — it earns its weight on prototypes, not on production sites where I’m chasing performance. I’d put more time into Core Web Vitals than this era of WordPress was built for, and I’d hold the build to WCAG AA at minimum — not as a bolt-on text resizer, but in the markup, the contrast, and the keyboard paths. Same brand, same brief, leaner site.