Wathen's Designs

Wathen's Designs is a small, one-person web development practice based in Utica, Kentucky, operated by Chris Wathen, a developer with over two decades of experience in WordPress and full-stack web work. Though registered in 2024, the practice draws on a career that began in the late 1990s and includes an in-house stint as lead developer at a creative agency. Clients appear to include organizations needing WordPress builds, such as a symphony orchestra and a professional services firm, suggesting a focus on small and mid-sized businesses and local institutions rather than large enterprises. The core service offering centers on WordPress development, including custom themes, plugins, and complex site architectures built for performance and scalability. Alongside this, the practice works with modern JavaScript frameworks such as NextJS and React, often for headless CMS setups and high-performance frontends. Cloud infrastructure is another stated capability, covering AWS, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare architecture design aimed at reliability and speed. Ongoing site management is also offered, encompassing maintenance, security updates, performance monitoring, and hosting. E-commerce development and SEO are listed among the declared services, with WooCommerce noted as a platform used in past project work. The stated approach emphasizes building websites as long-term systems rather than one-off launches, with attention to clean code and post-launch maintainability.