Wendy Schaffer
A UX writer who evaluates digital work for a living. She needed a platform worth her own standard. We built it.
Wendy Schaffer is a content strategist and UX writer. She works with digital products, evaluates interfaces, and understands what separates a site that performs from one that just looks the part. When she needed a marketing site and portfolio to represent her practice, she wasn’t a client who could be handed a template and a stock theme. She needed it to be right — technically, aesthetically, and by the standard she applies to her own work.
Working Model built Wendy’s site on WM-WP-base-theme — our proprietary WordPress foundation, built and maintained in-house. The result is a single-page marketing and portfolio site with GSAP-animated navigation, full accessibility compliance, a performance-optimized front-end, and ACF-powered content architecture she can manage herself. It scored 9.5/10 in our internal dev review — one of the highest scores in the process.
Client: Wendy Schaffer (Content Strategist / UX Writer)
Goal: A professional marketing site and portfolio that reflects the standard of work she holds her own clients to.
Key Deliverable: Custom WordPress theme built on WM-WP-base-theme, with animated navigation, ACF-powered content architecture, and Schema.org structured data.
Key Challenges & Strategic Objectives
- A client who knows the difference. Wendy works in UX. Generic templates and shortcut builds weren’t an option. Every decision — from component architecture to ARIA implementation — needed to be defensible to someone who evaluates this work professionally.
- Performance that holds under scrutiny. A portfolio site lives or dies on first impression. LCP, lazy loading, asset caching, and font loading all needed to be solved at the infrastructure level — not patched after the fact.
- Content flexibility without editorial complexity. The build needed to give Wendy full control over her own content without a developer in the loop — using ACF Free, not Pro, to keep the stack clean and the dependency list honest.
Technical Solution & Development
The build was bootstrapped from WM-WP-base-theme — Working Model’s proprietary WordPress foundation with modern tooling built in from day one.
1. WM Base Theme Foundation
Stack: WordPress + PHP 8, Vite 5, TypeScript 5 (strict mode), Tailwind 3, SCSS, GSAP 3, ACF Free. Design tokens unified across SCSS variables, Tailwind config, and theme.json — one source of truth for colour, type, and spacing. Vite manifest with content-hash filenames enables safe long-lived cache headers without manual cache-busting.
2. Navigation & Animation
GSAP-animated mobile drawer with a full focus trap — Tab and Shift+Tab cycle contained within the drawer. Escape key closes; focus returns to the hamburger trigger on close. aria-hidden, aria-expanded, aria-controls, and aria-label all managed in JavaScript, not hardcoded.
3. Performance Architecture
fetchpriority="high" on the LCP hero image for eager loading where it matters. Lazy loading applied via filter to all non-priority attachment images. Google Fonts preconnect hints in functions.php. Manifest cached by file mtime transient — auto-invalidates on every build, no manual flush required.
4. Content Architecture
ACF Free field groups — JSON-tracked in version control, no Pro dependency. Portfolio CPT with menu_order sorting for drag-and-drop reorder in WP admin. Schema.org markup (WebSite, Organization, BreadcrumbList, Article) dispatched per template.
Outcomes & Results
The project delivered a production-ready professional platform for a client who couldn’t be handed a generic result.
- Dev review score: 9.5/10 — one of the highest in WM’s internal QA process.
- Accessibility: WCAG-compliant navigation with full focus management, ARIA labelling, and skip-to-content.
- Performance: LCP-optimized, lazy loading on all secondary images, passive scroll listeners throughout.
- Content control: Full ACF-powered editing — no developer required for updates.
- Structured data: Schema.org markup across all templates.
Wendy Schaffer’s site is also proof of something else: the WM base theme isn’t theoretical infrastructure. It ships. This is what it looks like.
Let's Build Something That Works.
Tell us what you’re working on, what you’re stuck on, or what you want to bring to life. We’ll reply quickly, clearly, and with next steps you can act on.
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