HR Made Easy: Custom WordPress theme for a brand-led HR consultancy

HR Made Easy, an HR outsourcing consultancy serving UK SMEs, came to their agency Williams&Crosby for a brand-led website rebuild. The new site needed to communicate three distinct service pillars, carry a strong visual identity throughout, and be fully editable in the WordPress backend so routine content updates wouldn’t need a developer.

The site’s visual identity rested on a wide variety of designed card and CTA components: a dozen-plus distinct flex-content layouts, plus a two-level tabbed services page (three top-level tabs, each containing its own sub-item selector, with deep-linkable state from the homepage cards). Every layout had to remain editorially flexible (addable, removable, and reorderable on any page from the WP admin) while preserving the design’s visual character intact.

With this many distinct designed components, the responsive workload was substantial and demanded ongoing judgement calls. Each card composition needed its own reflow logic and breakpoint-specific tweaks so the design held up at every screen size. The tabbed services page had its own decisions to make about how the architecture should behave on touch devices.

A fully custom WordPress theme, built from the XD designs in PHP and vanilla JavaScript. The dozen-plus designed card and CTA layouts were built as ACF Pro flex-content components, organised as a shared library available to most page templates, with page-specific field groups added where the design called for something bespoke. The result is a consistent editorial toolkit: editors compose pages from the same vocabulary of blocks across the site, and only deal with bespoke field groups on the pages that genuinely need them.

The two-level tabbed services page was custom-built, with both the tab labels and the sub-item content fully editable through ACF on the WordPress edit screen. The homepage’s three service cards deep-link into the services page with a query parameter, which the page reads and uses to pre-select the correct tab on arrival. This makes the homepage cards function as direct entry points into specific services, rather than just generic links to a shared page.

The site shipped in 2025 and is in active use as HR Made Easy’s public web presence.

One honest reflection. A shared flex-content library scales nicely at launch, but the discipline it demands gets harder over time. Every new design across the site presents the same temptation: make it a shared component “in case it’s reused,” even when only one page will use it. The architecture here keeps the line clean (shared by default, page-specific where the design genuinely needs it), but that line has to be defended on every future iteration. Otherwise the library bloats into single-use components no editor remembers how to use.