ABOUT / RACHEL JOHN
How I found my way into web work.
My first HTML project was a simple family site when I was in my early teens. I did not go much further with it then. Years later, WordPress brought me back, and I discovered I enjoyed the visual decisions as much as getting a site to function.
COMING BACK TO THE WEB
The first real projects taught me the most.
In my late 20s, I began experimenting with WordPress. I liked the design side immediately: finding a better way to arrange information, choosing what to emphasize, and watching the pieces come together on a page.
One of my first substantial projects was the Valley Christian Church website. What began as a chance to design grew into years of learning through new pages, changing needs, events, and the everyday responsibility of keeping a site useful. As I took on other projects, that experience stayed with me.
LEARNING BY DOING
There was always another problem to solve.
Across projects, I found myself moving between content, mobile layouts, event graphics, social campaigns, and technical support. Each new request taught me something I could bring to the next one.
THE TURNING POINT
The requests grew. So did my toolkit.
As people asked for more involved features, I usually wanted to find a way to make them work. I did not always get it right the first time. Researching, asking questions, and trying again became a big part of how I learned.
01
Outgrowing preset themes
The more I wanted to shape a site around its content, the more I ran into the limits of themes that made too many decisions for me.
02
Finding a more flexible foundation
In my early 30s, I found GeneratePress and later GenerateBlocks. The learning curve was real, but the structure felt closer to the HTML and CSS I wanted to work with.
03
Seeing what custom work could be
The GeneratePress community, plenty of trial and error, and Mike Oliver’s course on lightweight WordPress sites helped me move from adjusting themes to building more intentionally.
That progression shows up in client projects such as Triple Clean’s quote flow, CJR Arts’ commission pathway, and the campaign site I built for Hazelip for Idaho. Each called for a different answer.
WHERE I AM NOW
More experience, more to explore.
I still enjoy the part of this work that asks me to learn something new. The tools have changed since that first family site, but I’m still curious about how to make something useful, work through what isn’t right yet, and keep improving it.
Because I’m self-taught, I often learned by solving the problem in front of me before I learned the formal name for the process. That made me resourceful, but it also showed me areas I want to strengthen—especially structured client discovery and mapping a visitor’s journey through a site. I’ve worked through both in real projects, and I’m learning to make those decisions more deliberate and better documented.