GOV.UK Campaign & Publishing Services • WordPress Multisite Veteran • Modern PHP & Full-Stack Delivery
Oliver Bould
Verified MatchSenior Public Sector Recruitment Consultant • LA International
Examples
Live public-facing WordPress platforms engineered and maintained by Chris Dorward. Direct proof of custom theme craftsmanship, security hardening, automated patching, and editorial publishing excellence.
Healthy Made Tasty
Public Health Campaign & Publishing Platform (Cancer Council NSW)
Large-scale public health campaign and interactive content platform for Cancer Council NSW. Engineered for high-traffic recipe discovery, interactive meal planners, rich taxonomies, and accessible nutrition resources across Australia.
- Public-Sector Health Campaign Delivery
- High-Traffic Recipe Search & Taxonomy Filtering
- WCAG 2.1 AA Compliant Accessible Publishing
All Mountain Performance
Ski Coaching & Performance Clinic (Chamonix, France)
Bespoke, performance-tuned WordPress platform engineered for high-conversion course bookings and rich media delivery. Features custom PHP theme architecture, zero bloated plugins, responsive accessible layouts, and aggressive asset caching.
- Bespoke PHP Theme & Template Hierarchy
- Mobile-First Responsive Layouts (WCAG 2.1 AA)
- High Page-Speed & Clean Asset Pipelines
Diamond Diving
PADI 5-Star IDC Scuba Center (Golfe Juan, France)
Hardened, multilingual WordPress publishing and booking platform. Engineered with custom course taxonomies, secure enquiry workflows, automated security patching, and accessible responsive design for European coastal operations.
- Multilingual Architecture (English & French)
- Hardened Core Security, Patching & Upgrades
- Custom Course Catalog & Taxonomies
Enterprise Foundation: Living Websites Multisite InfrastructureMultisite Scale
For several years, Chris founded and operated Living Websites, running an enterprise WordPress multisite network hosting hundreds of client sites. This provided extensive hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure, load balancing, automated core upgrades, and the continuous challenge of keeping multi-tenant WordPress networks secure and up to date.
Requirements match
Directly mapping DWP Digital's essential skills and experience requirements against 20+ years of senior software delivery.
Strong WordPress Development & Support
Founded and operated Living Websites, managing hundreds of live production WordPress sites on early multisite architecture. Extensive experience with zero-downtime upgrades, security patching, vulnerability mitigation, and automated health monitoring across high-profile public-facing sites.
Strong PHP Theme & Plugin Engineering
20+ years of professional software engineering with deep PHP mastery. Author of custom WordPress themes, child themes, bespoke plugins, custom post types, and REST API endpoints adhering to PSR standards and WordPress coding standards without relying on bloated third-party dependencies.
Accessible HTML5 & Responsive Web Content
Dedicated to public-sector accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA/AAA) and the GOV.UK Design System. Crafts semantic, keyboard-navigable HTML5 and responsive CSS that works flawlessly across all assistive technologies, screen readers, and low-bandwidth connections.
Vanilla JavaScript & Node.js Toolchains
Solid foundations in modern vanilla JavaScript (ES6+) for lightweight, dependency-free interactive UI components, combined with daily Node.js usage for build pipelines, asset optimization, automated CLI scripts, and microservice APIs.
Campaign, Publishing & Content-Led Websites
Extensive track record delivering content-led publishing platforms. Architected and maintained live client websites such as All Mountain Performance (allmountainperformance.com) and Diamond Diving (diamonddiving.net), balancing rich editorial publishing workflows with blazing load speeds.
CMS Architecture & Decoupled WordPress
Deep expertise across traditional and headless CMS architectures. Experienced in decoupling WordPress to function as a robust editorial headless CMS delivering structured data via WP REST API and GraphQL to high-performance frontend layers.
Unit Testing, TDD & Engineering Standards
Practicing test-driven developer with comprehensive unit and integration testing pipelines (Vitest, PHPUnit, Playwright). Committed to strict automated linting, type safety, regression testing, and code review guardrails before any release reaches production.
Agile / Scrum Multidisciplinary Teamwork
Thrived in cross-functional delivery teams collaborating seamlessly with product owners, user researchers, UX/GDS designers, and QA engineers. Active contributor to sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily stand-ups, and constructive retrospectives.
Documentation & Knowledge Sharing
Exceptional technical writing and knowledge transfer skills. Maintainer of comprehensive architectural documentation, developer runbooks, and open-source packages in the NX° monorepo (nx.goldlabel.pro). Skilled at breaking epics into precise, testable user stories.