My role at Sitemate has been an era of rapid growth. What started as me being hired to do mostly Figma wireframe work: designing new pages and reworking old ones exclusively in Figma before handing off to a developer, quickly turned into an end-to-end web design and frontend development role.
Shortly after beginning at Sitemate, the responsibility of building and updating pages was handed over to me. The current ecosystem was WordPress, so it was assumed that it would be an easy transition. Having already been experienced with some frontend web development, I quickly found myself fighting against the Beaver Builder building block tools, and slowly started transitioning into developing my pages using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Then came the introduction of Claude Code. Gaining access to this tool quickly opened up a lot of doors for our small marketing team. We started making the transition into a fully coded environment. The previous barrier had been closed: WordPress was great because anyone without a tech background could come in and make edits. Now it was even easier, anyone with a keyboard could access the internal skills and make edits on the spot.
The ecosystem looks a bit different now: while it's too risky to drop WordPress in one clean sweep, we have split our website into two parts: the existing legacy WordPress pages, and any new pages being built as a self-hosted headless page. We will slowly rebuild those old pages in the new system until we can drop WordPress altogether.
My responsibilities now vary vastly: I handle all the customer-facing brand, ensuring all assets and pages follow our strict guidelines. I design and build pages from start to finish, fleshing out designs in Figma and getting input and feedback from leadership along the way, before building the final pages in VS Code. I lay out the foundations for infrastructure, having designed and built the self-hosted website structure from the ground up to ensure all pages remain consistent and fully optimised. No two days are the same, and having adopted the new AI tools quickly and enthusiastically, the roof keeps getting raised on what my traditional design title now contains.
