Client · Law firm 2012

Chapel Law

Ground-up brand and custom WordPress build for a solo Missouri attorney. The brief: professional, low-maintenance, and built to run without attention.

Role

Designer & developer

Client

Chapel Law

Stack

WordPress · Tachyons · Advanced Custom Fields · Custom theme

File tree and code excerpt from the chapel-law-2.0 WordPress theme repository. Twenty-one files at the root; functions.php contains a small error formatter and an array_map autoloader that requires setup.php, page_post_title.php, and excerpt.php.

Context

Chapel Law came through a referral from an existing client. A solo practitioner, she needed a clean, credible online presence and had a clear brief: professional, low-maintenance, and built to run without regular attention.

The Problem

The challenge wasn’t complexity — it was discipline. A solo attorney’s site needs to establish credibility immediately and then get out of the way. Too much clutter undermines the professional image; too little and there’s nothing for a potential client to trust. The site also needed to be genuinely maintainable: minimal plugins, no fragile integrations, nothing that would require a developer call for a routine update.

Approach

Ground-up brand and 100% custom WordPress theme built on Tachyons, with Advanced Custom Fields handling all content editing. The design was clean and typographically focused: clear service descriptions, easy navigation to contact. No page builders, no excess plugins. A well-structured theme a non-technical user could update without breaking anything.

Build manifest for chapellaw.com: WordPress on a custom Tachyons-built theme, three plugins (Gravity Forms, Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast), Lighthouse scores of 98 performance, 100 best practices, 100 SEO, one to two touch-ups per year, fourteen years live.

Outcome

The site has required almost no maintenance since launch. Occasional bio updates, an added page here and there. For a solo practitioner who wanted it done right and then wanted to stop thinking about it, that’s the right result.

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