Jason Stockill built his son’s racing site himself, then handed it to a design service once it needed a WooCommerce store, a newsletter and a championship history. What changes when a site stops being a brochure.
WordPress sites carry more digital weight than they need. This post covers dark-first themes, lighter image formats like AVIF, and trimming the “digital fat” that slows sites down and drains batteries.
A streak is not a counter you increment. Notes on the psychology that makes streaks work, the timezone and race condition bugs that break them, and why grace mechanisms belong in the design from the start.
A 2MB GIF spinner is a network request competing with the content it is covering. Inline SVG loaders skip the request entirely, scale without blurring, and inherit theme colors through currentColor.
A pyramidal hexagon grid used to need JavaScript and negative margins. Modern CSS does it with grid auto-placement, sibling-index() and some triangular-number math, plus a fallback for narrow screens.
Mental health apps need more than clean code. This is the empathy-centred UX framework I use: progressive onboarding, low-stimulus interfaces, and a retention system that does not punish a missed day.
Agentic AI features need more than a good prompt. These are the patterns I use to keep users in control: intent previews, an autonomy dial, an action audit log with a working undo, and escalation when the model is not confident.
Chart libraries are heavy for four bars. Here is a CSS Grid bar chart that uses sibling-index() and attr() to read its values straight off the markup, plus the PHP helper I use to render it in WordPress.
Fifteen real WordPress sites looked at as architecture rather than inspiration: which themes they run, how they handle search and subscriptions, and where the block editor quietly does the work a plugin usually gets credit for.
Smashing Magazine’s February 2026 wallpapers collection, with the designs worth grabbing and a developer’s notes on shipping high-resolution images: srcset, lazy loading, and the mistakes that turn a wallpaper gallery into a slow page.