Insolvency World
A hand-built WordPress theme for plain-language guidance on debt, liquidation, and company rescue.
Insolvency World is a UK advisory hub for companies and directors in financial distress. It publishes plain-language guidance on the formal side of insolvency, debt, liquidation, and company rescue, territory where most of what exists online is either legal boilerplate or content that ends in a sales pitch. The site's job is to explain hard processes clearly enough that a worried business owner can actually understand their options.
I built the site as a custom WordPress theme in PHP: implementing the design as hand-written templates, structuring the content architecture around insolvency topics, and shaping the reading experience for long, dense guides. The brief was a publishing platform the client's team could run day to day, not a one-off brochure site.
Guide-led information architecture
The content model is organised around the questions people actually arrive with, debt, liquidation, company rescue, rather than a flat news feed. I mapped those topics onto WordPress categories and taxonomies, then built archive and single templates for each content type, so a guide, a news piece, and an explainer each get a layout suited to how they are read. Related content is surfaced within topics, so a reader who lands on one liquidation guide can find the rest of that cluster.
Hand-written theme, no builder
The theme is plain PHP templates on WordPress's template hierarchy, no page builder, no theme framework in the middle. Shared pieces like headers, article cards, and bylines live as template parts that every layout reuses, so a design change happens once. Keeping the stack this thin has a practical payoff for a content site: less code shipped to the browser, fewer plugins to keep updated, and nothing standing between the editors and the standard WordPress publishing flow.
Typography for dense material
Insolvency guides are long, and people read them under stress; the typography has to carry that. I set a measured reading column, a clear heading hierarchy, and enough spacing that a long guide on liquidation stays scannable, someone skimming for their specific situation should be able to find it from the headings alone. The same type system runs across guides, news, and static pages, so the whole site reads as one publication rather than a collection of templates.
Lean assets, native performance
Instead of stacking optimisation plugins, the theme leans on what WordPress already does well. Images go through registered sizes and native responsive srcset markup, styles and scripts are enqueued only where a template needs them, and the output stays semantic HTML that search engines can parse without help. For a site whose whole purpose is being found when someone searches a distressing question, keeping the markup clean is not polish, it is the product.
I started by mapping the design onto WordPress's template hierarchy: front page, topic archives, single templates for guides and news, and the static pages that anchor an advisory site. Anything that appears in more than one place, article cards, related-content blocks, category headers, became a template part with one source of truth. Taxonomies, menus, and image sizes are registered in the theme itself, so the content structure lives as versioned code rather than settings someone has to remember.
The second half of the work was restraint. A content site like this earns its keep through search, so I kept the plugin surface minimal, wrote the CSS and JavaScript by hand, and let WordPress's native mechanisms, the loop, responsive images, standard permalink structure, do the heavy lifting. The result is a theme where any given piece of the front end lives in one obvious file, and publishing a new guide requires no one technical.
Insolvency World is live at insolvency.world: a custom-themed WordPress publication where the client's team publishes guides and news on UK insolvency without touching code. The front end stays fast and readable under long-form content, and the topic architecture has room to grow as coverage expands, new guides slot into existing clusters instead of piling up in a flat archive.