Jasmine was in need of a new website to help her centralize some information, and to give her illustration business a fresh new face. I built the website without page builders, instead opting for custom PHP templates. The hero section animation is made with GSAP’s scrolltrigger and general animation library. The contact form is made with Contact Form 7, and many of the text and colors on the homepage is controlled with ACF fields. The original work custom post type loops through art posts, and shows a masonry grid of art pieces. These art pieces link to etsy posts, hopefully moving traffic towards etsy. The website is still undergoing live edits as of this post, as it has not been actively promoted yet.
Author: xjmackey
In my most recent role as a Full Stack Developer at Beyond The Brand Media, I spent most of my time working in WordPress, primarily in an eCommerce environment. My day to day work involved building custom themes, plugins, shortcodes, and one off functionality using PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, and MySQL. A lot of the job was about making sure sites were not just functional, but maintainable, stable, and able to grow without becoming fragile.
I worked across a large catalog of live eCommerce sites, which meant thinking carefully about performance, accessibility, and long term upkeep. When you are responsible for sites that people actively rely on for their businesses, small decisions add up quickly. I got very comfortable working with WordPress hooks, APIs, and established best practices to make sure changes were clean, predictable, and easy for others to understand later.
One project early on that I am particularly proud of was a custom plugin I built to help manage our site ecosystem. It would ping all the sites in our catalog, identify which plugins were installed, and report their versions. This made it much easier to respond quickly when a plugin vulnerability was discovered. For example, if there was an issue with ACF, we could immediately see which sites were affected and address it without guesswork. It was a small internal tool, but it saved time and reduced risk in a very real way.
Accessibility was another area I focused on. While there is always more to learn, I became confident helping with accessibility improvements and remediations, with the goal of reducing potential liability for business owners and demonstrating alignment with ADA and WCAG guidelines. In practice, that meant improving markup, fixing contrast issues, making forms more usable, and thinking more intentionally about how real users navigate a site.
Beyond the technical work, what really stood out to me about Beyond The Brand Media was the people. I worked closely with designers, project managers, and clients, and those relationships felt genuinely collaborative. There was a strong sense of trust and mutual respect, and I appreciated how open everyone was to questions, feedback, and shared problem solving. I learned a lot from my coworkers, both technically and professionally, and it was the kind of environment where you felt supported while still being encouraged to take ownership of your work.
Overall, it was a role that strengthened my full stack skill set, sharpened my judgment around real world constraints, and reinforced how important good communication and strong working relationships are in building quality software.
Beyond the Brand Media Success Stories
In the above page, I worked with my best friend and previous coworker Casey Grenier on a school project at SVA. The goal was to have a web article she could show in class. It was a very fun little project where Casey made the art and the text, and I worked on building the page and the interactions. Working with GSAP was very fun, and hiding in little things to discover and play with was very rewarding feeling. (Try getting the piano to play). I enjoyed the small additions like adding in a small game that illustrates the potential degradation of the building. I hope you enjoy.
During the summer of 2024 I had the unique opportunity to take a couple months of my unemployment to engage in a bit of a passion project, which was working as a digital archive assistant, and helping to collect and catalog runaway slave ads from confederate newspapers. In my personal time I have an interest in the history of slavery, and how slavery was defended and how it overlapped with other contemporary factors. Reading through these old confederate newspapers gave me a deeper appreciation for how to handle and care for old documents, it gave me an opportunity to develop my own process for data collection techniques, like batch processing, optimizing data entry, and file sharing. Futher, upon completing the project I was able to make suggestions for potential future improvements.
Lastly, I participated in a podcast episode that you can find here, and I also make a small database of extra files I found in my searches here.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
I cannot disclose all of my work with Promosis, but at a high level I collaborated with well known brands to build sweepstakes pages, product registration websites, and large scale promotional campaigns. Many of these projects supported high traffic events, which meant working with sizable databases and ensuring that forms, registrations, and data flows were reliable under real world load.
A significant part of my work involved building and maintaining web applications that handled large volumes of structured data, especially product registrations and promotional entries. On the backend, this meant working extensively with PHP and MySQL to design, query, and maintain databases that needed to be both flexible and dependable. On the frontend, I developed additional tools and visual components for legacy sites, improving usability while staying within existing constraints.
I also built smaller interactive experiences in JavaScript, including browser based games used for promotional engagement. These ranged from visual pattern recognition and memory style games to interactive search and comparison mechanics. While each game was relatively small in scope, they required careful frontend logic, state management, and attention to performance and user experience.
Alongside development, I regularly used Figma to produce wireframes, icons, and design assets, which helped bridge the gap between design intent and implementation. My primary tools were HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and MySQL, and as a full stack developer I was comfortable moving between frontend behavior, backend logic, and database structure as needed.
Through this work, I gained confidence not just in writing clean, maintainable code, but also in documenting decisions, keeping thorough notes, and clearly communicating issues or tradeoffs with my senior developer. That combination of technical range and communication was essential in an environment with long lived projects and high visibility campaigns.
Below is a link to the Promosis portfolio. I cannot specify which individual projects I worked on, but it reflects the overall scale and quality of the work I contributed to.
Promosis Portfolio
I worked at Guild Hall in a few different capacities. I was originally brought on to build and maintain the CEO’s website and to help set the foundation for what would eventually become an educational makerspace. That role quickly expanded beyond just web work as the space took shape.
As the makerspace came together, I became one of the instructors, teaching kids the fundamentals of programming, art, design, and engineering. I worked hands on with Raspberry Pis using Python to build practical projects, including a door locking mechanism that used RFID chip readers. I also used Arduinos to teach students how to build simple robots and how to control LED strips in different patterns, which introduced concepts like hardware control, logic flow, and debugging in a very tangible way.
On the web side, my goal was to design and build all of the core pages needed to get the shop up and running. This included structuring content, thinking through user flow, and making sure the site could grow as the space evolved. While the site has since been updated in ways that do not fully reflect my original implementation, many of the underlying design decisions and layout concepts are still present.
This role was a mix of technical execution and communication. I had to translate abstract concepts into something approachable for students, while also thinking long term about systems, structure, and usability. It reinforced my ability to move between building things, explaining how they work, and designing with real users in mind, which is something I continue to value in my development work.
Helping a Northshore charity reach more people
While still working with the fine folks at Global Children School I reached out to a charity group in the Northshore that I knew through Instagram. I greatly appreciate all the things they do in the area to help people. So I wanted to reach out to them and ask if I could help them design a website. I only had a little bit of time to work with them and was upfront about that. But I wanted to give them a jumping off point. So I set them up with an Elementor based WordPress site because I believed that it would be something that they could learn to use independently and really benefit from.
I let them know to reach out to me if they ever need any help with the website and I hope they do. I hope I’ll never be too busy to where I can’t spare a little time for a really caring charity. They had a pretty well established brand identity with set colors, so that part was easy. But I did pick out things like fonts, I set them up with some nice branding in the header, and I made sure that they had a page to send people to their donation pages. It was a great experience to work with a group as welcoming and grateful as they were.
Update: The charity did eventually close down as the students moved on. Site no longer available.
Solidarity NorthshoreAn internship turned contract
Starting in December of 2020, I began an internship with Global Children School as an amateur web developer. I worked closely with the CEO, Tatyana Basile, to redesign and redevelop the school’s WordPress website. This was my first role out of college, and while it was a challenge, it was one I felt prepared to take on.
At the start, getting comfortable with WordPress took some adjustment. I was used to building static HTML files and working more directly with front end structure, so learning how WordPress themes, PHP templates, widgets, and stylesheets fit together was a shift in mindset. The interface felt unintuitive at first, and it took time to understand where styles lived, how content was being injected into templates, and how to work cleanly within an existing CMS rather than around it.
After a few months of hands on work, I developed a solid understanding of how WordPress functions under the hood. I became comfortable making structural changes, adjusting layouts, and implementing design updates in a way that respected the platform while still allowing for flexibility and customization.
Alongside the web work, I received a crash course in Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud tools, including Illustrator. I had an art background going into the role, but this was my first time applying it in a professional design and marketing context. During the internship, I produced a large volume of digital content, including a full brochure for the school, a logo design for a new website that had not yet launched, wireframes for that site, a large format backdrop for a graduation ceremony, and multiple digital assets used across the website.
At the end of the internship period, I was brought on as a contractor for a short engagement to finish implementing the redesign. That extension gave me the opportunity to see a project through to completion and to apply what I had learned in a more independent capacity.
While the site has since been updated, several of the structural and design changes I implemented are still in place. Overall, the experience gave me a strong foundation in working with WordPress, collaborating directly with a CEO, and balancing design, development, and real world constraints early in my career.
Global Children School