I’ve been a web designer and developer since 1993. “You’re Got Mail!”. Remember that? We’ve come a long ways since AOL first gave us a “web browser” and email. Along the way Content Management Systems (CMS) were created and have evolved to the point that 75% of all websites are CMS driven.

For 10 years at GCN Media I worked with the Typo3 CMS and built dozens of custom sites for corporate and medical clients. About eight years ago I switched over to WordPress and have never looked back. It’s fun to build WP sites with all the built in frameworks and dev-ops setup.

A few months ago I discovered the Understrap starter theme. It’s the starter theme I’ve been looking for. It combines the Underscores starter theme which is developed by WordPress developers with Bootstrap5. The thing with Underscores is out of the box it isn’t really ready to go. You need to do a fair amount of work to get it running and looking good.

The Understrap team solved this issue by combining Bootstrap5 with Underscores which makes it so you can quickly get a site up and running and looking good. That makes for a lot more time to write code and start customizing. On top of the CSS framework npm setup is included to make building and deploying easy.

This site (lafarge.net) is built on that starter theme. Custom work includes building custom Gutenberg blocks and integrating a slider for some of the visual galleries.

Below are a few more WordPress sites I’ve built over the years. There’s also links below to some of the in-use coding projects I’ve worked on.


Repdai – Bootstrap5 based design. Built in WordPress using Understrap starter theme and exported as static to be used in a custom CMS.

KLD Interiors – custom theme design and build. No longer in business.

KLD Interiors Home Page Image

Rajanaka – Yoga Philosophy