The hosted platform that makes WordPress accessible to everyone — and the product I’ve helped shape for over a decade.
I joined Automattic in 2011 and have been designing and building WordPress.com ever since. From the reading experience to onboarding to the dashboard itself, my work has touched nearly every surface of the product.
Calypso
I was a founding member of the team that rebuilt WordPress.com from scratch. Codenamed Calypso, this was a ground-up reimagining of the WordPress.com dashboard as a single-page React application powered by the WordPress REST API — one of the first major production apps of its kind. What started as a team of seven grew to over 100 contributors.
Calypso reimagined how people work with WordPress. For the first time, you could manage all your WordPress sites from a single interface — auto-updating plugins and themes across every site, managing backups, and switching between sites seamlessly. It was fast, responsive, and delightful in ways the old PHP dashboard simply couldn’t be. It also shipped as a native desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux using Electron.
The entire codebase was open sourced on launch day — a major move that made headlines across the tech press. I was largely in charge of the Reader experience within Calypso, but worked across the entire product with a small team of designers to shape the whole thing.
Reader
I was integral to creating the WordPress.com Reader — the experience for following and reading blogs from anywhere on the internet. Launched around 2012, it combines posts from WordPress.com sites and self-hosted WordPress sites connected through Jetpack into a single, personalized feed. It’s still a core part of WordPress.com today.
Editorial & Community
I worked closely with the editorial team to design and build several community-facing products: Freshly Pressed, the curated blogging magazine that surfaced the best writing from across the platform; Blogging U, a community-driven school teaching new bloggers how to find their voice and grow their audience; and a full redesign of the WordPress.com blog itself.
Onboarding
I was the lead designer for WordPress.com’s signup and onboarding flow — the first thing millions of people see when they start building a site. The work focused on making the experience more intuitive while improving conversions and reducing churn.