Grandpa Goes Yard

Grandpa Goes Yard is a content-first brand around yard help, landscaping, and the slow craft of working with land. The client came to us with a finished static HTML demo and one ask: get this on real WordPress without redoing the design, and without giving up the custom-built feel for a templated theme.

The category online is dominated by two failure modes. Templated WordPress themes that swallow the brand the day they’re installed, and bespoke designs that ship as static HTML and then never make it to a real CMS because the developer didn’t want to do the conversion. The brief was to land between those: a real WordPress site, editable in the block editor, that looks and reads exactly like the static demo.

The build:

• A custom-coded theme that lifts the demo’s three-color editorial palette (forest green, cream paper, ink) and the typography stack of Bricolage Grotesque for display, Source Serif 4 italic for emphasis, and IBM Plex Mono for small caps. All three fonts self-hosted from one woff2 per family.
• Gutenberg-only authoring. No MetaBox CPTs, no structured field groups. The client edits posts and pages in the block editor and the theme renders them in the demo’s voice.
• A newsletter signup pulled in as a third-party embed instead of a custom lead-capture form. The brand doesn’t need a CRM pipeline, so we didn’t ship one.
• SiteGround hosting on the client’s existing account, with a GitHub Actions deploy that pushes the theme and plugin on every commit to the staging branch. Promotion to production is a fast-forward merge to master.
• Slim SEO for per-post title and description overrides. No SEO suite, no schema bloat, no admin clutter the client didn’t ask for.

The project was built on our cloneable wp-starter template. We clone the starter into a new client folder, run a rename script to fill in client-specific values, and ship from there. The result is that an Outerwave client onboarding starts on a working scaffold (deploy pipeline wired up, conventions in place, theme and plugin already organized) instead of a blank theme. Every project sharpens the starter for the next one.

This is the kind of static-to-WordPress conversion we want every freelance designer to bring to us. The design stays exactly as the designer shipped it. The CMS is real. The deploy pipeline is set up on day one. And the client gets a site that loads in milliseconds because there is no page builder, no bundler, and no unused JavaScript on the page.