Wind River Country is the corner of Wyoming beyond Yellowstone — wide-open public lands, the Wind River and Absaroka mountains, the Wind River Indian Reservation home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes, and towns like Lander, Dubois, and the old gold camps of Atlantic City and South Pass City. The Wind River Visitors Council needed a new site that could carry all of that history, landscape, and living culture without feeling like a brochure.
I led the team that built it, the same way I approached The Mat-Su, Alaska — owning the theme and technical architecture, contributing to key block development, and managing the project end to end.
Project Role: Lead Developer & Project Manager — Theme Architecture & Block Development
Technologies Used: WordPress, custom block theme, custom Gutenberg block development
What I Did:
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Theme Development & Architecture. I built the WordPress theme and defined the technical architecture behind it — the content model, templating, and the structural patterns the rest of the team built against. The goal was a fast, maintainable foundation flexible enough to handle the site’s rich, editorial layouts.
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Key Block Development. I assisted on the development of key custom blocks that power the site’s content — the filterable destination and recreation grids, event modules, and media-rich sections — so editors can assemble dynamic, on-brand pages without touching code.
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Project Management. As lead, I ran the project: coordinating the development team, setting technical direction, managing scope and timeline with the Visitors Council, and keeping the whole build aligned through to a successful launch.
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Team Leadership. I set the patterns and made the architecture decisions the team built against, reviewed and integrated everyone’s work, and made sure the pieces held together into one cohesive, performant site.
Outcome:
The result is an immersive destination site that does justice to Wind River Country’s enormous landscape and deep cultural heritage, while giving the Visitors Council a flexible, block-based platform their team can grow on their own. Leading it from architecture through launch — and getting hands-on with the blocks that make it tick — puts it right alongside the work I’m most proud of.
