A custom-built WordPress theme for a bio site
I designed and built TomStewart.com from the ground up, a custom-coded WordPress site with no page builder, giving full control over both the design and the underlying code. I developed the site’s navy/gold authority branding and built out all 9 pages: Home, About, Books & Resources, Certifications, Innovation, Media/Podcasts, Articles, Leadership, and Contact, fully responsive and mobile-optimized throughout.
Beyond the design, the site runs on custom PHP and JavaScript I wrote specifically for it, no ACF, no third-party plugin doing the heavy lifting. A few pieces worth calling out:
Interactive career timeline
The homepage’s interactive career timeline spans Tom’s career from 1994 to present, tagged by category (Business, Certifications, Books & Education, Technology, Leadership, Media), with client-side filter pills that show and hide milestones instantly, no page reload or server round-trip.
The Smart Business Moves media library
The Smart Business Moves media library pulls Tom’s full ~500-episode YouTube playlist live via the YouTube Data API, paginated and cached, then renders it as a searchable library with a featured player and a responsive sidebar/card layout. Every video across the site, including the shared lightbox and a gated-download modal, uses a click-to-load facade pattern: nothing from YouTube or HubSpot loads until a visitor actually clicks, keeping the site fast by default. I also wrote a small layout algorithm that auto-balances the homepage video grid into even rows (3-5 columns) for any video count, rather than leaving an awkward leftover row.
Gated downloads with HubSpot
For the Books & Resources page, gated PDF downloads route through HubSpot forms injected on demand, solving a real HubSpot quirk in the process: the modal has to be revealed before the form embed is inserted, since HubSpot measures its container immediately on load and a hidden container gets measured as zero height, silently breaking the form.
Editable without touching code
Three sections (the homepage video library, the Media page archive, and the Articles page) are editable by Tom without touching code, via a hand-rolled repeater meta box with drag-to-reorder support. And the Articles page pulls Tom’s guest column from Cleaning Business Today by combining CBT’s RSS feed (for text/dates) with a separate REST API call (to recover featured images RSS doesn’t include), cached in transients and custom-paginated for a clean grid layout.
Structured data for every video
Every media card also emits its own VideoObject structured data, so search engines and AI crawlers can understand each video independently of YouTube’s own metadata.
