How I built One Web Nerd without overcomplicating it
When I rebuilt my own website as One Web Nerd, I intentionally tried not to turn it into a technology experiment.
I wanted the site to feel modern and custom, but I also wanted it to stay practical. That meant using WordPress, Gutenberg and a relatively small set of tools instead of building everything around a large page builder or a complicated stack.
A lot of the visual system lives in WordPress Global Styles and theme.json: typography, colors, spacing, buttons, layout widths and reusable styles. The idea was to define those things once and let the site use them consistently instead of styling every page independently.
That sounds simple, but it took some work to get there.
The site started with individual pages for the main services: Fix, Improve, Manage and Build. As those pages came together, patterns started to emerge. Heading styles, section spacing, buttons, cards, content widths and color treatments that had originally been decided page by page could gradually become part of the overall system.
That is the part of web design I enjoy most. A good site does not need every page to look identical, but it should feel like all of the pages belong to the same place.
Gutenberg works well for that when it is treated as a design system rather than just a collection of blocks.
I use Groups, Columns, Rows, Grids and reusable patterns for most of the structure. Custom CSS is there when it is useful, but I try not to solve every problem with another class. If something should behave consistently across the whole site, I would rather make it part of the global system.
The same thinking applies to plugins.
I have spent years working on WordPress sites with very large plugin stacks, and sometimes that is completely justified. But for One Web Nerd, I wanted to keep the site as lean as I reasonably could. If WordPress already does something well, I would rather use the native tool than add another dependency.
That does not mean avoiding plugins just to prove a point. Forms, SEO, custom taxonomies and other specific needs still benefit from good tools. The goal is simply to use them because they solve a real problem, not because every site is supposed to have the same collection installed.
That approach comes from working on very different kinds of websites over the years.
Through Handcut Designs, I have worked with restaurants, artists, nonprofits, childcare, local businesses and ecommerce companies. At LKH&S, I worked on larger client sites and ongoing web operations, including WordPress and HubSpot environments.
The scale changes, but many of the problems are surprisingly similar.
Content needs to be updated. Forms need to work. Someone has to understand where the domain is registered. Analytics need to be installed correctly. A page that looked fine three years ago starts feeling dated. A plugin breaks. A business changes direction and the site no longer reflects what it actually does.
Building a website is only one part of the job.
That is also why One Web Nerd is organized around Fix, Improve, Manage and Build rather than around a list of technologies.
Sometimes a business needs a new website. Sometimes it already has a perfectly usable one that just needs attention. Sometimes the best solution is WordPress. Sometimes Carrd, Wix or another platform makes more sense.
The technology should fit the problem, not the other way around.
For my own site, WordPress and Gutenberg were the right fit because I wanted control, flexibility and a system I could continue refining over time without making it unnecessarily complicated.
And that is probably the clearest way to describe how I like to work in general: use the tools that make sense, keep the structure understandable, and build something that is still useful after the launch.