Ellen Harvey
CLIENT
Ellen Harvey (Independent)
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, Mythus, IX, Timber/Twig, PHP 8.4, DDEV, DigitalOcean
YEAR
2026
EXTERNAL URL
A ground-up WordPress rebuild of a performer’s personal website — a site that had been hand-coded as static HTML some 25 years earlier. The engagement preserved the existing design pixel-for-pixel while replacing the underlying engine, moving news, résumé, and photo galleries into a CMS the client can update herself.
Rebuild, content migration, and hosting for an independent client — set up as a low-friction, long-term maintenance relationship.
Background
A beloved 25-year-old website, no longer maintainable — and a developer who had gone quiet.
Ellen Harvey’s personal site had served her well for a quarter century, but it was hand-coded static HTML from another era — impossible for her to update, and her previous developer had become unresponsive. She needed the site brought into a system she could actually maintain, without losing the look she and her audience knew. The mandate was preservation first: keep the design exactly as it was, and change only what was underneath.
For a non-technical client, the real deliverable wasn’t a redesign — it was independence from developers for day-to-day updates.
Implementation
The same site on the surface, an entirely modern engine underneath.
I rebuilt the site on my standard WordPress stack — the Mythus mu-plugin framework and IX parent theme with a project-specific child theme, on Timber/Twig and PHP 8.4 — recreating the original layout, typography, and galleries faithfully rather than reinterpreting them. The static pages became editable content: news posts, a résumé, and photo galleries all moved into the CMS so Ellen can add a credit or swap a photo without touching code.
Hosted on a self-managed DigitalOcean droplet with a git-based deploy workflow — the same infrastructure pattern I use across my freelance builds.
Results
A familiar site she can finally maintain herself.
The rebuilt site launched looking just as it always had, now running on WordPress and hosted on infrastructure I manage. Ellen updates her own news, résumé, and galleries through the editor, and the relationship continues as an ongoing, low-touch maintenance arrangement — exactly the kind of dependable, long-term support she’d been missing.
