web · wordpress · this site

dariobimbi.com

This site. A custom WordPress block theme written from scratch, with no page builder, no external fonts, and no JavaScript framework.

The pitch

The pitch on this site is partly the site itself. I work with WordPress every day at my day job, and I wanted a portfolio that showed I could build a clean WordPress site without reaching for a page builder or a JavaScript framework. Everything you see here, from the SEO meta tags in the head to the contact CTA at the bottom, is hand-written PHP, HTML, and CSS in the theme directory.

How it works

The theme is a Full Site Editing block theme, which means the templates are HTML files (not PHP) and the layout is editable from the WordPress block editor. Anywhere a real query or a piece of dynamic data is needed, I move that block out to a PHP pattern and have the template invoke the pattern. That keeps the templates simple and makes the dynamic bits easy to find.

There is also a hand-rolled SEO module in inc/seo.php that handles titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph and Twitter card tags, and JSON-LD structured data. The SEO defaults are set as constants at the top of that file, and any per-page tuning lives next to the rendering logic so it is easy to read.

What is on it

The homepage runs as a hero, an about section, an experience timeline, a playground of live demos, a projects grid, a skills list, and a contact form. Those demos open up in full under a separate /demos/ section, from a tower-defense game called Ant Buster and a Pokédex that pulls from two APIs to a Pokémon card browser, an AI prompt studio, and smaller experiments like a contrast checker and Conway’s Game of Life, plus a couple of old games hand-ported from Processing. There is also a /projects/ section like the one you are reading right now.

What I took away

Building your own portfolio is a slightly humbling exercise. You think you have your aesthetic figured out, and then you try to write the homepage paragraph and realize you do not. Most of the work on this site was less about code than about deciding what to say. The voice you are reading was rewritten about three times before it landed in the place I was happy with.