The problem
Capes Sokol is a law firm with a large, content-heavy site, and I came in through Ty Thomas at Creative Mischief, the agency building it, for three specific pages, Attorney Detail, Practice Detail, and Practice Archive, on a stack of WordPress, Beaver Builder, and Advanced Custom Fields. Ty was explicit about the structure from the start: this was a trial for three pages, meant to find the right long-term developer for the rest of the build. Beyond those three pages, the site had a real technical obstacle already in the way, the agency's usual mega menu plugin crashed the site every time it was installed, with no clear cause.
What I built
Phase 1: Attorney and Practice templates, built from design files
Attorney Detail Page — a custom post type template with dynamic fields for each attorney, an accordion section breaking down practice areas and services per person, and tiered search and filtering surfacing related content, articles, blogs, podcasts, tied to that specific person.
Practice Detail Page — an individual practice-area template (Business and Finance was the first built), with relationship mapping connecting practice areas to services to the attorneys who provide them.
Practice Archive Page — an archive template listing every practice area, built to match the global design system Ty's team had already established, so it read as part of the same site rather than a bolted-on addition.
Two of the three pages were delivered within 24 hours of the contract starting, with all three fully responsive shortly after.
Content architecture, decided before any code
Before building, I pushed on how practice areas, services, and attorneys should actually relate to each other, since that decision shapes everything downstream. Two real options existed: treat practice areas as shared categories with services as subcategories used identically across every attorney, or give each attorney genuinely unique service pages even where the service name overlapped with a colleague's. Getting this right before building meant the template structure didn't need to be redone once real content started going in.
A mega menu built around a plugin that kept crashing the site
The agency's usual mega menu plugin broke the site on every install, an unresolved, recurring problem by the time I got involved. Rather than keep forcing the plugin, I proposed and built the mega menu natively, using Beaver Builder saved rows, a shortcode, and targeted CSS, so the site got the mega menu design it needed without depending on a plugin that had already proven unstable.
Phase 2: Performance and template overhaul
As the relationship grew past the initial three pages into a full site-wide engagement, the site had accumulated real performance debt, PageSpeed sitting in the 40s, Cumulative Layout Shift at 2.8, and Largest Contentful Paint taking 5.28 seconds, on top of scattered design elements and inefficient content management. Beaver Builder had to stay in place for the internal team's static-page editing, so this wasn't a rebuild, it was a hybrid: custom PHP templates powered by MetaBox for dynamic content (attorney profiles, practice areas, resources, firm news), while Beaver Builder kept handling static pages exactly as the team already knew how to use it.
Performance work brought PageSpeed from 49 to 84, Cumulative Layout Shift from 2.8 to 0, and Largest Contentful Paint from 5.28 seconds to 300 milliseconds, through critical CSS optimization, streamlined image handling, and a full rebuild of the global navigation for accessibility and responsiveness.
What actually changed
| What changed | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Attorney & practice pages | None built | Custom templates with dynamic fields, accordions, tiered search |
| Content relationships | Undecided | Mapped: practice areas → services → attorneys |
| Mega menu | Plugin crashed the site on install | Custom-built with Beaver Builder saved rows, no plugin dependency |
| Initial page delivery | N/A | 2 of 3 pages within 24 hours of contract start |
| PageSpeed score | 49 | 84 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 2.8 | 0 |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 5.28s | 300ms |
| Navigation (site-wide) | Outdated | Rebuilt, accessible, responsive |
| Content management | Scattered, editorially rigid | MetaBox-powered dynamic templates alongside Beaver Builder |
What the client said
"Great progress! It looks very consistent. Glad to hear everything is working again."
— Ty Thomas, Creative Mischief
The engagement
What started as a three-page trial, explicitly framed by the client as a test case for a longer relationship, grew into ongoing, site-wide work: templates, navigation, and eventually a full performance pass, all while working inside an agency's existing design system rather than around it.