Client · Law firm 2012

Chapel Law

Ground-up brand and WordPress for a Missouri attorney who needed it done right and then left alone.

Role

Designer & developer

Client

Chapel Law

Stack

WordPress · Custom theme

File tree and code excerpt from the chapel-law-2.0 WordPress theme repository. Twenty-one files at the root; functions.php contains a small error formatter and an array_map autoloader that requires setup.php, page_post_title.php, and excerpt.php.

Context

Chapel Law came through a referral from Dashtaki Law. Different client, different need — Neda’s practice had grown into something complex; this was a solo practitioner who needed a clean, credible presence and didn’t want to think about the website again.

Approach

Ground-up brand and WordPress build. Clean typography, clear service descriptions, no clutter. The brief was essentially: make it look like I know what I’m doing and make it easy to contact me.

Build manifest for chapellaw.com: WordPress on a custom Tachyons-built theme, three plugins (Gravity Forms, Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast), Lighthouse scores of 98 performance, 100 best practices, 100 SEO, one to two touch-ups per year, fourteen years live.

I built it to be low-maintenance by design — minimal plugins, stable theme, nothing exotic. The goal was a site that would run quietly for years without attention.

Outcome

chapellaw.com has done exactly that. I hear from them once or twice a year, usually to update a bio or add a page. The footer credits justinchick.com. This kind of project — set it, make it solid, move on — is a meaningful part of a healthy freelance practice.

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