Challenge
After fifteen years on the same WordPress theme, my own site no longer matched the work I was doing. The visual identity was dated. The content was scattered across legacy URL structures. The site claimed AI fluency without showing it. Performance was middling. SEO was inherited from defaults nobody had tuned. The site that was supposed to introduce my practice to prospects was, in many places, talking past them. The brief was simple: rebuild it from scratch as a real demonstration of the way I now build for clients, not as a portfolio piece.
Approach
Treat my own site like a paid engagement. Real PRD with phased scope. Editorial design system on a custom WordPress theme. Modern build pipeline (Sass, GitHub Actions auto-deploy to Flywheel). Performance budget enforced from day one (filemtime asset versioning, self-hosted Fraunces, WebP at responsive sizes). Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) and SEO/AEO baked into the foundation rather than layered on. Sister WordPress plugins (wm-clients, wm-lead-widget, wm-booking, wm-ledger, wm-proposals) refactored alongside the theme into a single coherent ecosystem with their own auto-deploy workflows.
Delivery
Custom WordPress theme built from scratch on the Inter + Fraunces type system with a warm-clay accent palette. Editorial homepage with marquee, services teaser, selected work scroll-rail, dark-section process band, testimonials trio, and writing surface. Dedicated /work/, /services/, /process/, /lab/, /about/, /writing/, /web-design/, /start/ pages, each with its own structured spine. /start/ form integrated with the lead-widget pipeline so submissions land as Client records, fire admin notice + visitor ack emails, and reactivate archived contacts on reentry. JSON-LD schema graph: Person, ProfessionalService, FAQPage on /web-design/, /process/, /services/, BreadcrumbList, Speakable on every article. Yoast SEO filtered to use hand-tuned per-page titles and meta descriptions. /llms.txt at site root for the AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude). Lighthouse 100 in Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO; 90+ in Performance with TTFB ~50 ms on cached page hits.
Outcome
A site that is itself the proof. Prospects looking at williamalexander.co are looking at the practice they would be hiring: editorial design that holds up, performance that is measurable, SEO and AEO baked in, lead pipeline that actually works, AI integration where it pays, all running on hosting I tuned and a deploy pipeline I built. The work is documented commit by commit in the public Git history. When a client asks 'what would you do for us,' the honest answer is now 'pull up williamalexander.co, that is the way I build.' The site went from 41 Lighthouse Performance and 92 a11y at the start of the redesign to 90+ Performance and 100 a11y at launch.