Josh Morley WordPress, SEO and paid search

Skill · Web design

Design work I have been hired to do

My design work is conventional on purpose. Clear hierarchy, real content, real photography where the client has it, and layouts that still work when somebody pastes in a paragraph twice as long as the one in the mockup.

I am not the person to hire for an award-winning art direction piece. I am the person to hire when the site needs to look credible, load fast, be editable by the client's own staff, and not fall apart at 390 pixels wide.

What I am usually asked for

  • Full site designs, built as block themes with design tokens rather than one-off page styling
  • Redesigns of dated sites where the content and rankings have to survive
  • Figma, XD or PSD designs implemented faithfully in WordPress
  • Design systems inside a page builder, so the client's team can build new pages on brand
  • Landing page design against a specific campaign and conversion goal
  • Accessibility remediation on existing designs
  • Responsive and layout bug fixing on sites somebody else built

How I work

I design in the browser for anything that will live in WordPress, because a static mockup hides the two things that actually break: long content and narrow screens.

When a layout misbehaves I render the page in a real browser and measure it before touching a line of CSS. I have been caught twice by the same CSS grid sizing behaviour by theorising instead of measuring, so now I measure.

Styling goes in theme tokens and shared classes, never inline on individual elements, so the site is still consistent after a year of the client editing it.

Past jobs

Four design jobs and what happened

Client names withheld.

Holiday lettings network, full rebuild

Block theme build
Brief
A dated multi-property lettings network that looked its age and was unmanageable for the owner, with a decade of organic rankings that could not be put at risk.
What I did
Built a full-site-editing theme with the design set in theme tokens, rebuilt every page on it, designed and added 22 resort hub pages that had never existed, and ran a URL parity check against the old site before cutover.
Result
Launched with 610 of 610 URLs matching, so no redirect chains, no ranking loss, and an owner who can now add a property without calling me.

Aviation charter site, 407 location pages

Design at scale
Brief
Hundreds of airport pages built up over time with inconsistent titles, inconsistent layouts and inconsistent data presentation.
What I did
Defined one naming and layout convention for the whole set, then applied it across all 407 pages, with the aircraft specification data audited page by page rather than mass-replaced, because the differences turned out to be legitimate variant figures and not errors.
Result
407 pages normalised to a single convention, and around 160 data points held back for client sign-off rather than silently changed. I would rather ask than be confidently wrong at scale.

Accessibility remediation programmes

Accessibility
Brief
Several clients, mostly in the US, needing their sites brought up to standard: contrast, focus states, heading order, form labelling, and image alternative text across large media libraries.
What I did
Automated audits per page to find the machine-detectable failures, then manual review for the ones a tool cannot judge, with alternative text written rather than auto-generated. Fixes applied at template level so they hold for new content.
Result
Measurable, re-testable improvements with a report per page, so the client has evidence of what was done and when, which is the part that matters if anybody ever asks.

Design changes that would not apply

Inherited builds
Brief
A recurring job: a client's page builder site where edits appear to save and the front end keeps showing the old design. Usually blamed on caching, and usually not caching.
What I did
Worked out the actual causes and now check for them first. One builder keeps a separate rendered-markup cache that has to be cleared when content is changed outside the editor. Another renders a library layout instead of the page content when a section is set as global, so editing the page changes nothing at all. A third serves a stale per-page CSS file from the uploads folder.
Result
Problems like these get diagnosed in minutes rather than billed hours, because I have hit every one of them before and written down what it was.

Opinion

How I think about design decisions

Conventional beats novel for a business site. People scan for the things they expect to find: what you do, where you are, what it costs, how to get in touch, proof that you are real. A design that hides any of those to look fresh is costing the client money.

Real photography beats stock, and stock beats generated imagery, for anything where a buyer is deciding whether a business is genuine. I will push for real photos even when it slows the project down.

And a dense, information-rich page with real product and service detail usually outperforms a sparse, beautiful one. I have tested this often enough to argue it with some confidence.

Tooling

What I work in

WordPress

Block themes and the site editor, theme.json design tokens, classic themes and child themes, custom block patterns.

Builders

Elementor, Divi, Avada, GenerateBlocks, Beaver Builder, WPBakery. Including the quirks of each.

Front end

Hand-written HTML and CSS, modern layout, no framework unless the project already has one. Playwright for rendering and measuring.

Design and checks

Figma handoff, axe and Lighthouse, real device widths, Core Web Vitals field data rather than lab scores alone.

Reviews

Clients on the design and build work

Josh has made this site happen. His skill set includes technical and strategic expertise which is how we are building a darn good site on a reasonable budget.
Kathy R. Codeable
Josh was fantastic to work with. He provided a clear and detailed proposal, and his responsiveness throughout the process was excellent, he always got back to our questions quickly and with helpful detail. We had a strict deadline we wanted to achieve, and he focused on making that possible without compromising on quality. I really appreciated his professionalism and support, and would happily recommend him.
Emily Rubin Google
Josh stepped in at short notice and built the page we needed for a client contract in days. He was amazing. Thank you so much.
Lisa E. Codeable
Josh helped me with a couple of tricky CSS issues on an eCommerce project. The communication was great, the quality of his work outstanding, prices are fair. Fully recommend!
Franz Sauerstein Ecommerce marketing consultant · LinkedIn
We had some accessibility issues that needed to be remediated on our website. Josh was incredibly easy to work with and very responsive. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find anyone who could do a good job using Divi Theme and solve our remaining accessibility issues. Josh changed my perspective on that. I would definitely use his services again and highly recommend Josh for work on projects like this.
John B. Codeable

The rest of the skill set

Most jobs touch more than one of these. I can take the whole thing or just the part you are short of.

Contact

Tell me about the role or the job

Contract, part-time, one-off fix or white-label work for another agency: all fine. Say what you need and when you need it, and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.

Email
hello@josh-morley.com
Based
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Hours
10am to 5pm GMT
Reply
Within one business day
Languages
English (native)

Prefer to talk first? Book a discovery call, or download my CV.

You can also hire me through Codeable, where the rating, project count and reviews are all independently verifiable.

The more specific you are, the more useful my first reply will be.

Or email hello@josh-morley.com