Case studies

I've been advising M.L. Campbell's digital content architecture for several years. The YouTube channel reached 128,393 views by doing the opposite of what most industrial brands do: problem-solving content first, product content second. Here's the strategy — and the harder problem of measuring a channel where the attribution runs through distributors, not clicks.

A 2002 author-publishing platform that ran 16 years with zero ongoing maintenance. Static-site generation years before the pattern had a name.

I worked on the canada.com portal architecture on WordPress VIP in 2011–2012, aggregating coverage from eleven Postmedia papers under a national domain with no editorial staff of its own. The portal required fundamentally different architecture than any newsroom in the network, even running on the same parent theme.

The M.L. Campbell Learning Center replaced a per-seat SaaS with a custom LearnDash build. Annual platform cost dropped below one month of the previous bill. Active learners grew tenfold. The architecture — role-based tracks, resume state, location-linked reporting — was built for how distributor staff actually work.

Active-learner attendance grew by an order of magnitude, and the platform cost a fraction of the system it replaced. This is the story of a custom WordPress + LearnDash LMS built to be the qualification layer underneath an entire distributor sales network, and what that architecture looks like when staff competence is the actual product.

A manufacturer's site can't take an order, yet it decides whether the distributor's showroom survives. What the website is really for when the storefront closes.

Fourteen hours on my own site, $30,800–$61,847 of senior WordPress delivery on the work log, and a 64% measurement gap the file itself surfaced before I did. AIOS, the internal system that routes the work, produced both numbers.

Eleven of Canada's largest daily newspapers moved onto WordPress VIP under a single parent theme, 2011 to 2012. I was on the team that shipped it.

In 2011–2012, I was one of the principal developers on Postmedia's migration of eleven daily newspapers to WordPress VIP, built on a single parent theme. Brand identity and editorial controls lived in each paper's child theme. The National Post was the proving ground — among the first Canadian media networks on the platform at this scale.

A gallery with no digital presence. A cinema running membership sales through a new e-commerce channel. A consignment shop with a loyal following but a site that didn't reflect the room. Three engagements, one junior practitioner executing, one senior advisor at the quality gate. Here is what that split produced.

Three businesses in and around Ridgeway, Ontario. A junior practitioner built each site; I set the standard, reviewed the work, and held the quality bar. The delivery model — not the specific clients — is what this case study is about. Two of the three businesses are still running under the same sites.

I designed mlcampbell.com's architecture knowing the website could never complete a sale — distributors do. The entire structure follows from that constraint: spec sheets serve as product pages, the distributor locator is the real CTA, and the goal is qualification and handoff, not conversion.