A Custom WordPress Theme and Order-Management Plugin for a Web Design Studio

A web design studio selling website builds needed its own order pipeline inside WordPress: a long, multi-step brief form on the front end, and somewhere sane for staff to read and work those orders on the back end. The existing site had a broken order path and email that was not reliably arriving.

The theme

We built a full custom theme rather than bending a commercial one, structured with an SCSS build (abstracts, base, components, layouts, pages) so styling stayed maintainable, and ACF for editable content.

• Multi-step order form with state persistence — every field auto-saves to local storage as the customer types and restores on return, so navigating away mid-brief no longer loses the work. State clears on submit, and the honeypot field is deliberately excluded from persistence.
• File uploads — a photo uploader plus an Additional Files path accepting documents (PDF, DOC and similar) with document cards, handled over AJAX and attached to the order email.
• Navigation state — the Industries and Add-ons sections stay expanded when a customer navigates back to the form, instead of collapsing and forcing them to find their place again.
• "Select This Design" showcase — a multi-select toggle on the design showcase that carries chosen banners into the order form's Additional Details as a removable list, folded into the submitted notes.
• Email branding and templates, a WebP image pipeline, WooCommerce and Polylang integration, and a security include.

The orders plugin

A separate nextday-orders admin plugin gives staff an order list and an order detail view inside wp-admin, with its own AJAX layer — so orders are a first-class admin object rather than a pile of emails.

What actually happened to it

We are recording this one plainly. Every feature above was built and browser-verified end to end during development on staging. The final state of the project is a snapshot commit taken deliberately before reverting the customer's site to the client's original design: the client asked for the contracted fixes only, and the wider build we had produced was rolled back. The snapshot exists so that any individual piece can be re-applied later if the studio wants it.

So this is not a clean handover story, and we do not present it as one. It is a substantial custom theme and plugin that were built, tested and preserved — and a reminder that scope delivered beyond what was contracted is not automatically scope wanted.