Selected projects

A Ridgeway consignment shop with a loyal local following needed better product photography, sharper social, and a working online store. Elizabeth Ross delivered all three; Christopher Ross advised as senior.

A community cinema and social space in Ridgeway needed a stronger digital presence and online annual memberships. Elizabeth Ross led photography, social, and the web/e-commerce build; Christopher Ross served as senior advisor.

A Ridgeway gallery's full digital launch: site, photography, and social presence built from scratch by Elizabeth Ross, with Christopher Ross as senior advisor.

WordPress site for M.L. Campbell's primary brand, a modernised web experience that preserves technical product credibility for a professional coatings brand sold through distributor channels.

WordPress site for Sayerlack, a conversion-focused build designed to support technical buyers and distributors with credible product presentation and clear brand hierarchy.

Across the channel I produced 128,393 views, 4,600 watch hours, and 1,200 net new subscribers. That is not a beauty-influencer number.

WordPress training portal for the M.L. Campbell Training Center, structured for practical learner access, ongoing content updates, and clear programme navigation.

Between 2018 and 2021, Christopher delivered training for Bass Pro Shops' Tracker Boats division, combining a LearnDash online certification track with hands-on classroom sessions to bring a distributed team up to consistent product knowledge.

Moodle rollout across multiple retail locations for Le Château between 2016 and 2020, organized by role, tied to real store conditions, with a centralized update workflow that pushed changes to all sites at once. The brief wasn't a platform question; it was a fit question.

Headless jQuery store locator rebuild for Sleep Country Canada, decoupled from their ASP.NET WebForms backend, mobile and desktop, spring 2015.

Online double-play layer for the 2015 Tim Hortons Roll Up the Rim to Win contest: ASP.NET build with code authentication, redemption tracking, and the audit trail a national contest depends on.

BlackBerry's B2B publication on WordPress VIP. Theme work across the 2011 self-hosted-to-VIP migration and the 2013 unified-codebase rebuild.

Inside BlackBerry was the umbrella property above four blogs running on WordPress VIP from a single shared theme. I worked the 2011 and 2013 builds.

BlackBerry's developer-relations blog on WordPress VIP: code samples, SDK release notes, API guidance. Theme work through the 2011 and 2013 rebuilds.

BlackBerry's support-content blog on WordPress VIP: troubleshooting, software-update guidance, recovery procedures. Theme work, 2011 and 2013.

Stop administrative brute force attempts targeting xmlrpc.php. Discover how to disable XML-RPC functionality programmatically via custom plugin filters or server-level rules.

canada.com was the Postmedia property that didn't fit the newsroom template, because it didn't have a newsroom. A WordPress VIP contributor portal for dozens of celebrity blogs under Canada's national authority domain.

Child-theme work on the Edmonton Journal: sibling-paper homepage discipline on the shared Postmedia parent, WordPress VIP, 2011-2012.

WordPress Multisite for the Liberal Party of Canada: one platform, hundreds of independent candidate websites generated for a federal election. Part of the team that built it.

Theme engineering on the Montreal Gazette: bilingual SEO and discovery for English publishing in a French-language city, on WordPress VIP in 2011-2012.

I worked on the National Post platform migration in 2011-2012, when Postmedia's flagship daily moved onto WordPress VIP at the start of the network rollout.

Platform migration work on the Ottawa Citizen: link integrity and source attribution for a federal-policy readership, on WordPress VIP in 2011-2012.

Newsroom theme work and taxonomy architecture on the Windsor Star: cross-border auto-industry beat at archive scale, on WordPress VIP in 2011-2012.

Performance work on the Calgary Herald: homepage tuning under heavy ad load on an energy-sector news cycle, on Postmedia's WordPress VIP rollout in 2011-2012.

Newsroom theme work on the Financial Post: business-daily templates tuned for market-hours load and data-dense article layouts in the early 2010s.

Child-theme defaults and CMS ergonomics for the Regina Leader-Post: lean-newsroom theme UX on the shared Postmedia parent, WordPress VIP, 2011-2012.

Child-theme architecture for The Province: tabloid voice on the same shared Postmedia parent that carried The Vancouver Sun, on WordPress VIP in 2011-2012.

Newsroom theme work on The Vancouver Sun: broadsheet article templates and section landings tuned for long-form readers, on Postmedia's WordPress VIP build in 2011-2012.

Bespoke WordPress VIP build for Swerve, the Calgary Herald's arts-and-events sister brand. Notable for an early-2010s HTML5-Geolocation experiment that reordered the front-page event listings and advertiser placements based on the reader's location, when almost no editorial site was actually using browser geolocation for content personalisation yet.

Bespoke WordPress VIP build for DOSE.ca, Postmedia's digital-native entertainment magazine. Built on a custom framework that sat on top of the Postmedia VIP infrastructure but did not use the chain's standardised daily-paper blog theme, with community-first content types and social-share affordances built into the editorial flow.

Per-paper theme and tablet template for The StarPhoenix on the shared Postmedia WordPress VIP blog platform, the multi-tenant theme system that ran the blog networks across every Postmedia daily in the country. One codebase, per-tenant configuration, one operational baseline for the central platform team to maintain.

Custom online auction tool for Isaac's Way Restaurant, Fredericton: bidders came in to view the artwork, charity beneficiary rotated by exhibition. WordPress, 2011.

Free digital political-news property published out of the Hill Times newsroom in Ottawa, put onto WordPress as part of the same engagement that moved the Hill Times itself off Drupal. Same publisher, same WordPress foundation, different audience and value contract.

WordPress theme development for StockTwits FX, the forex trading community within Howard Lindzon's StockTwits platform. Launched January 2011.

Drupal-to-WordPress migration of The Hill Times, Canada's politics-and-government newspaper of record in Ottawa, done with the publisher's internal team. Two pieces of craft worth bragging about: every legacy URL kept working after launch, and the entire paid-subscriber base migrated to Stripe without anyone being asked to re-enter their credit card.

Custom WordPress theme for StockTwits U, the education arm of Howard Lindzon's StockTwits financial social network. Launched February 2011.

WordPress migration for jamesaltucher.com, completed January 2011, coordinated with Phil Pearlman of StockTwits during the broader Blog Network buildout. The line in the original email thread, "James, before we make the final migration happen I want to ensure your email is safe," is the sentence most migration projects don't include.

Custom WordPress theme for the StockTwits corporate blog, the main publishing voice of Howard Lindzon's financial social network in 2011.

Custom WordPress theme for Howard Lindzon, co-founder and chief executive of StockTwits, built late 2010 / early 2011 as one site inside the broader StockTwits Blog Network ecosystem. The theme's job was to stay out of the writing's way under daily-blogger cadence and the occasional traffic spike.

Custom WordPress theme for StockTwits 50, a curated showcase of top stock trading setups from the StockTwits community. Launched March 2011.

Custom WordPress theme development for one of North America's longest-running culinary television franchises: two successive themes built to carry a large editorial archive, recipe library, and DVD store.

Joomla theme development for the Dukes of Dixieland, one of the United States' most decorated traditional jazz bands, with performances at the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian.

WordPress migration and campaign-period maintenance for a 2010 U.S. House campaign in South Carolina's 1st district, subcontracted through The Mace Group LLC.

Multi-year WordPress retainer for The Mace Group LLC, a South Carolina political-media firm: server migrations, campaign sites, AdSense work, and same-weekend turnarounds across 2009 to 2011.

Director of Technology at Yorkville University, 2008-2009: integrated learning stack across four schools and two provinces: Moodle, WordPress, and a custom Student Information System.

WordPress front-end for the Academy of Design Toronto inside the Yorkville group's integrated four-school technology stack, with Moodle LMS and custom SIS shared underneath. 2008 to 2009.

POOL: Pedigree of Oat Lines, 2008. Tag-driven research database for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Central Experimental Farm, built so oat-genetics researchers could find what colleagues elsewhere had observed about the same problem.

WordPress front-end for RCC Institute of Technology inside the Yorkville group's integrated four-school technology stack, with Moodle LMS and custom SIS shared underneath. 2008 to 2009.

WordPress front-end for Toronto Film School inside the Yorkville group's integrated four-school technology stack, with Moodle LMS and custom SIS shared underneath. 2008 to 2009.

Mid-2000s WordPress build for the Stan Cassidy Foundation in Fredericton, the fundraising arm of New Brunswick's provincial rehabilitation hospital. A custom bilingual content system, built before WordPress had any native or third-party answer for serving English and French as equal partners.

Campaign website for Ed Broadbent (NDP), Ottawa Centre, 2004 federal election. Bilingual custom PHP/HTML build on Macromedia Dreamweaver; hosted via Magma Communications Ottawa.

Federal bilingual HR policy hub on Rodonic Advantage, the Classic ASP + SQL Server multi-tenant CMS my then-partner David McGregor and I built at Rodonic Corporation. Used a publish-to-static-HTML pattern that wouldn't have a standard name (static site generation) for another decade.

Knowledge Asset Inventory for Natural Resources Canada, 2004: the searchable layer inside a federal ministerial Brief In Notes system. PHP front-end on IIS, FileMaker Pro database, custom-built bridge between them, inside a federal security envelope.

Portfolio entry for Ottawa Flight Training, an early Ottawa-based web and design project from my Rodonic studio days. Source notes preserved from 2003.

Bilingual landing-page and newsletter platform for the Canadian Technology Human Resources Board, 2003: PHP + MySQL front end with custom spam-heuristics and Excel handoff to the internal newsletter tool.

Newsletter publication and distribution system for Aboriginal Human Resources Development Canada (AHRDC), 2003. Classic ASP + Microsoft Access + direct SMTP: federal-grade self-serve publishing for civil servants, predating the hosted email-marketing era.

The public-facing portal where Canadians signed up for Bell's Sympatico internet service and ordered their modem, built directly with Bell in 2003.

Internal end-to-end conference-attendance workflow for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), built in 2003 under the federal Government Online initiative. PHP web layer on a FileMaker Pro backend, connected through a custom PHP-to-FileMaker bridge, with one record carrying an employee from request through manager approval through registration through their auto-generated bilingual badge.

2003 project for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade: web cameras installed on poles at two Canadian embassies under construction abroad, capturing one JPG per second and FTPing the frames home so trade show audiences in Canada could watch the buildings going up in something close to real time. A polling-and-refresh pattern that still ships everywhere.

Custom OCR-to-HTML batch pipeline for digitizing 2,500 pages of legacy Environment Canada publications to ec.gc.ca, 2002, built to the Common Look and Feel Standards in force at the time.

Interface design and ColdFusion back-end for Algonquin College's continuing-education catalogue: 35,000 searchable course descriptions built for the registrar.

Rodonic Corporation built the PHP version of the Authors Guild SiteBuilder, a hosted multi-tenant website builder for members of one of America's oldest literary nonprofits. Operational by November 2002 (before WordPress launched) and ran continuously through July 2017.

Web design and ASP development for FOCAL, an Ottawa-based hemispheric policy think tank whose site ran from first launch until the organization closed its doors.

FOCAL's bilingual Cuba research directory, an online index of policy and research resources built for low-bandwidth access alongside the hemispheric think tank site.

Late-1990s Corel Corporation web work: the 30,000-page corporate site retired in September 2000. UI conception and graphics for corporate strategy and quarterly reports.

Corel Corporation's community resource for users of Corel LINUX OS: news, tutorials, product details, training updates. QA contributor on the team that produced it.

buy.corel.com: Corel Corporation's 2000-era e-commerce surface. Designed and produced as a member of the Corel web team, mirroring the corel.com homepage visual language.

CorelCity.com: Corel Corporation's 2000-era public web portal for clients, business partners, and visitors. Web graphics and QA contributor on the team that produced it.

Web experience work for Corel Designer community properties, focused on content updates, resource access, and loyalty-building touchpoints for product users.

Monthly-updated resource hub for Corel WordPerfect Office Suite users, one of five Corel community properties maintained by the in-house web team.

The first website I ever shipped, in 1996, for Canada's oldest tobacco shop, which is still trading in downtown Kitchener today. Hand-written HTML, scanned cigar photos, a fax field on the contact form. I built it on a tilde-user account at the local ISP, because that is what 1996 looked like.