This portfolio site

A professional portfolio designed, built and maintained in WordPress — rebuilt from scratch using Twenty Twenty-Five and the Full Site Editor, with a multilingual EN/DE structure, GDPR compliance, accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA, and an evolving plugin stack managed independently.

Solo project · Self-initiated · Ongoing

Overview

rothrockportfolio.com — live site

This portfolio is both the work and the proof of the work — a WordPress site designed, built and managed independently, demonstrating the full range of CMS management skills in a live, maintained environment. It has been through one full version and is currently being rebuilt as version two, using WordPress’s Full Site Editor and the Twenty Twenty-Five block theme.

Version History

V1 – V2

The move from Riverbank to Twenty Twenty-Five is a deliberate decision to work with WordPress’s current direction — Full Site Editing is where the platform is heading and demonstrating FSE skills is directly relevant to CMS management roles. The rebuild also introduces a bilingual EN/DE structure using Polylang, reflecting both the Berlin market and a genuine technical skill.

Design Decisions

Structure and visual direction

V1 – Riverbank

V2 – Twenty Twenty-Five

Visual comparison — v1 Riverbank vs. v2 Twenty Twenty-Five

• Three-pillar navigation structure — CMS Work, Website Design, Development — reflecting the primary skill sets rather than generic section labels
• Custom colour palette — muted purple, forest green accent, light grey and dark grey — set as named tokens used consistently across all templates
• Typography: Fraunces & Epilogue — selected font pairing applied globally through Styles, replacing Twenty Twenty-Five’s default system fonts
• Three page templates built in the Site Editor — Home, Pillar page (shared across three sections), Project page (shared across all case studies)
• Synced patterns for repeated elements — project card, references block, meta strip — built once and reused across pages

Plugin Stack

Chosen tools and why

Each plugin was chosen for a specific purpose — nothing installed without a clear reason. The stack is deliberately lean: 12 plugins covering security, SEO, performance, legal compliance, forms, content display, analytics and multilingual structure.

CMS Structure

How the site is managed

Page Template structure

Site Editor Style book

Polylang language management

• Global styles set in the Editor Design/Styles panel — colour palette, typography, spacing applied once and inherited everywhere
• Header and footer built as Template Parts — edited once, updates across all pages automatically
• Polylang language pairs connected at page level — every EN page has a corresponding DE page, language switcher block in the header
• Rank Math + Polylang integration enabled manually — multilingual SEO requires a specific configuration step, not automatic
• WPConsent configured before any other scripts — cookie consent must be established before analytics or tracking loads, a legal requirement in Germany

Accessibility

WCAG 2.1 AA throughout

Accessibility is not a feature added at the end — it is a constraint that shaped decisions throughout the build. The site carries a WCAG 2.1 AA compliance statement in the footer, backed by deliberate choices at every level.

• Skip to main content link in the header — keyboard users can bypass navigation without tabbing through every menu item
• Semantic HTML throughout — headings in logical order, landmark regions (main, nav, footer) used correctly in block templates
• Colour contrast ratios checked against WCAG 2.1 AA — all text and interactive elements pass at all sizes
• All images have descriptive alt text — not filename-based defaults, written descriptions of what is shown
• Keyboard navigation tested — all interactive elements reachable and operable without a mouse

Performance

PageSpeed Results

Performance is monitored via Site Kit by Google, which surfaces PageSpeed Insights scores directly in the WordPress dashboard. Image compression via Smush with lazy loading enabled, WP Super Cache for page caching, and the lightweight Twenty Twenty-Five base theme keep load times fast without a CDN.

Ongoing Management