About
Outerwave Media is Nick Cesarz, a one-person WordPress studio in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. 15 years in WordPress, one client at a time. The site you’re reading was built on the same stack and process I’d use for yours.
The short version
Most Milwaukee businesses end up with one of three websites: a templated theme that looks like every other small business in town, a page-builder Frankenstein that loads in five seconds, or an agency build where the person who pitched you the project hands it off to a team you never meet. Outerwave is the alternative: custom-coded WordPress with no middleman between the person you talk to and the person doing the work.
Where I came from
I’ve been building in WordPress since 2011. That’s long enough to have watched Bricks and Elementor and Divi each promise to “fix” WordPress, and concluded that the platform was already fine. What it needed was people who treated it like a real platform instead of a blank canvas to dump templates onto.
Before Outerwave, I worked on enough projects to have shipped real production work in every corner of WordPress. Custom plugins for high-volume affiliate sites. Performance fixes on bloated agency builds. Editorial workflows for music and gear-review publications. Complex content systems for fintech. The throughline is that every project ended with something the next person could actually read and extend, not a page-builder template the next agency would charge to rebuild.
How I work
I take on one client at a time. That means a 6 to 10 week build doesn’t get spread thin across four other projects in parallel. It also means you talk to me directly: no rotating project manager, no account exec forwarding emails, no “I’ll check with the team and get back to you.”
Every build is custom-coded. No Bricks, no Elementor, no Divi, no Avada, no ThemeForest preset. The reason isn’t snobbery; it’s that every page builder I’ve used adds 200KB to 1MB of weight to a page that doesn’t need it. A custom-coded site is often under 100KB total. That’s the gap between a Google PageSpeed score of 100 and one of 65 on real client sites I’ve shipped both ways.
What you get at the end is a WordPress installation you can host anywhere, edit yourself, or hand to any other developer. No “OW exclusive” plugin, no platform you have to keep paying me for, no lock-in. The site is yours the day it launches.
Who actually builds your site
Most agency websites are sold by one person and built by another. The salesperson writes the proposal, takes the kickoff call, and then quietly hands your project to whoever the agency has on the bench that month, working under deadline pressure. You meet the salesperson twice: at kickoff and at launch.
I’m not running that play. The person on the proposal is the person doing the work. The 15 years of experience isn’t a credential to point at, it’s why your site will load fast, stay easy to edit, rank in search, and still work three years from now without a rebuild.
Local matters
Outerwave is based in Menomonee Falls. If you’re a local business, kickoff coffee and on-site planning are on the house, every time. I work with clients across the Milwaukee metro and into Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties. There’s no substitute for sitting down with the people whose business you’re building the website for, and when the geography allows it, that’s how every engagement starts.
Want to work together?
The fastest path is the cost estimator: five questions, an honest budget range, and a recommended package in 90 seconds. From there, the next step is a 20-minute call. No sales pitch, no handoff to a project manager, no “discovery call” that’s actually a pitch deck. Just a quick conversation about what you’re building and whether we’re a fit.