Over twenty years. That’s how long I’ve been living inside WordPress, helping people build websites, fix websites, understand websites, and occasionally rescue websites from decisions made in a moment of misplaced confidence. In all that time, somehow, the blog never quite happened.
Until now. Pull up a chair.
If you’ve ever built a WordPress site and thought “this works, but I know it could be better,” you’re in the right place. If you’re a developer who wants to think more carefully about what you’re building and why, also the right place. And if you’re somewhere in between, a DIY site owner who has learned more than you expected and wants to keep going, welcome. This blog is for all of you.
Here’s what you’ll find here. Accessibility, because it’s not optional and it’s not as complicated as people make it sound. WordPress development, with a focus on the block editor, GeneratePress, and GenerateBlocks. Practical guidance on things I find myself explaining over and over again, which usually means they’re worth writing down. The occasional deep dive into something small that turns out to matter quite a lot, like a single HTML attribute that changes everything for a screen reader user. That kind of thing.
The name WP With Heart isn’t an accident. WordPress is a tool, a remarkably powerful one, but the websites we build with it are for real people on both sides of the screen. Visitors who need to find information, fill out forms, make decisions, feel welcomed, feel understood. And owners who deserve a web presence that actually feels like them: their personality, their values, their way of showing up in the world. When that happens, something clicks. Someone visits your website, then walks through your door or hops on a call, and it feels like a natural continuation of something that already started. Not a bait and switch, not a polished version of you that disappears in person. Just you, expressed well and expressed first. That’s what good web work makes possible, and that’s the thread running through everything here, whether I’m writing about markup or membership sites or why your progress bar needs one more attribute.
I’ve been doing this work for nearly two decades, long enough to have strong opinions and loose enough to keep changing them when something better comes along. I have a background in fine arts, which sounds unrelated to WordPress until you realize that both are about making something with intention and care. I’m based on the Central Coast of California, I organize a WordPress meetup that just turned ten, and I am genuinely, perhaps unreasonably, excited about accessible web development.
Glad you’re here. Let’s make good things.