Developer-of-Record for a National Home Furnishings Retailer

The situation

In 2015 a national home furnishings retailer was launching a WordPress editorial blog alongside its enterprise e-commerce platform. Their internal IT team ran serious infrastructure but was new to WordPress. They were seeing latency and timeouts in the WordPress admin, and they wanted a security review before putting the platform in front of a very large customer base.

What I did

The engagement began as a performance and security audit. I reviewed the WordPress installation, worked directly with their internal IT team on the Linux and AWS environment, resolved the admin latency issues, and set out a baseline for security, theme management, and plugin governance.

That audit turned into an ongoing role. Over the following decade I became the retailer’s WordPress developer of record across editorial properties for two of its brands, including a Canadian edition of one blog. The work has covered theme development and design implementation, QA and release coordination with their managed WordPress host, SEO remediation under a dedicated statement of work, and security reviews for customer-facing forms, including the application flow for their trade professional program. During critical launches the cadence has included daily status check-ins with their e-commerce team.

The engagement

This is an eleven-year continuous relationship, active from 2015 through the present, spanning nearly three thousand email threads with their marketing, e-commerce, and IT teams. The shape of the work is the point: a large retailer with deep internal engineering chose to keep one outside specialist on its WordPress properties for over a decade, through multiple redesigns, hosting changes, and internal reorganizations.