A content product for older adults, designed on paper and still in production seven years later

The job

A wellness company serving retirement communities needed its ageing system replaced with a product its members, most of them over seventy, would actually use. I took it from paper sketches through Adobe XD to a hand-coded WordPress application, working directly with the company's COO and later CEO, and I have maintained and extended it since.

What I built

• The product itself: authentication, a content-management back end for the client's team, and an interactive member front end, all as a custom WordPress application rather than a theme on a page builder.
• A personalised recommendation engine that serves audio, video and written content from quiz answers and profile data.
• A real-time engagement and behaviour dashboard for the client, and automated content administration so the team could publish without a developer.
• Data migration and import tooling from the old system, plus database optimisation once the content library grew.
• Accessibility choices made for the audience from the first screen: one question per page, large-font and dark-mode toggles, generous targets.

Why it matters

Most contractors cannot show a client relationship that has lasted seven years, or a product that is still in daily use. This one is both. The modernisation now being scoped adds Playwright regression suites against staging, so that changes stop breaking things quietly: the argument for it is concrete, not theoretical.