A WordPress rebuild should still be editable on Monday

There is a tempting shortcut in a website redesign: make the homepage look perfect in a static preview and deal with editing later. It works until the client needs to publish an event or change a program page, and the new design turns out to be a collection of one-off templates nobody can maintain.

In a WordPress rebuild, we kept a real local WordPress install beside the active theme so previewing meant seeing the theme in the environment that would actually render it. The repository had older theme copies and legacy routes, which made a clear source of truth essential. The handoff document says which theme folder is active, which files own the header and footer, and which pages have dedicated templates.

Give important pages a real home

One program page and the events page moved from query-based legacy views into dedicated WordPress pages. That may sound like a small routing change. It affects navigation, editing, previews, and the way a content editor understands the site. A stable page is easier to link to and easier to own than a special case hidden inside a shared template.

The rest of the older program pages still use a shared legacy flow. Keeping that distinction visible prevents an innocent header change from being tested only on the homepage while another page quietly breaks. A rebuild often has to coexist with the previous structure for a while; pretending the migration is complete creates surprises.

Local preview is part of the workflow

The project uses a local database for previewing content and a theme mounted into that WordPress install. This gives the team a quick way to see real page rendering without editing a live site. It also makes the differences between a mock router and WordPress proper explicit. A design can pass in a theme-only preview and fail when WordPress chooses a template, loads a menu, or renders content fields.

Before delivery, the theme package has to match the active source. That is an unglamorous but necessary check. Shipping an older zip after the last round of fixes is a handoff failure, even if the local preview looked excellent.

The design is finished when the person maintaining the site can make a normal update with confidence. A good handoff explains where things live and what to check after a change. It saves the next Monday morning.