Case study
Before WordPress: how a 2002 author platform ran for sixteen years
A 2002 author-publishing platform that ran 16 years with zero ongoing maintenance. Static-site generation years before the pattern had a name.
Read the case studyEdTech and learning with AI: Technology for people who can’t afford for it to break.
Learning platforms, publishing systems, and the AI around them: technology your team can understand, audit, and keep running. Built by one senior technologist, not an agency layer.
“Chris leads with generosity and has a real gift for making technical topics accessible without oversimplifying them. WordPress development, technical SEO, or training: Allison Smith recommends Christopher without qualification.”
Client organizations
Work delivered for
Selected work
Evidence, not adjectives.
Case study
A niche B2B YouTube funnel: 128,393 views from buyers who weren't browsing
I've been advising M.L. Campbell's digital content architecture for several years. The YouTube channel reached 128,393…
Read the case studyWho I work with
Three kinds of work, one standard.
Education
Learning platforms and AI
Learning platforms for colleges, universities and the teams behind them, and honest help deciding where AI actually belongs in teaching and learning.
Learning platformsPublishing
Editorial platforms
Editorial CMS work for newsrooms and membership publishers where downtime is a headline: migrations, performance that holds, and the governance that keeps AI inside the workflow accountable.
PublishersSpeaking
Talks on learning with AI
Conference and campus talks on learning and working with AI, from someone who builds these systems and is studying how people learn with them.
SpeakingWhy one developer, not an agency
The depth is the difference.
- Online before the first browser war ended.Web since 1996, WordPress since 2007. The depth shows in the architecture, not the pitch deck.
- Dozens of plugins built and released.Five on WordPress.org, maintained and peer-reviewed.
- MA candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads.Learning-and-technology research embedded in practice, not kept separate from it.
- Government of Canada standards.WCAG, bilingual, accessibility: the compliance bar most agencies outsource.
- AIOS, my own AI-operations layer.Routing, cost attribution, and an audit trail across every AI task, built for my practice first and adapted for clients.
Accessibility and AI access
Built so people don’t get locked out.
Accessibility here is a precondition, not a phase at the end of a project. Every build meets WCAG 2.2 AA and AODA, and I test with a screen reader rather than trusting a scanner’s score. That part I have been doing for years.
The newer question is who gets access to AI. My MA research at Royal Roads is in learning and technology, and the thing I keep returning to is who gets left behind when these tools become the default way to learn and to work. Remote and rural communities are first in that line: thinner connections, less support, and software built for people who already have both. I am working toward that, not claiming it as a track record yet.
- Accessibility is a precondition.The stance behind the work, written down so you can hold me to it.
- A free deadline lookup.Canadian organizations can check the date their accessibility obligation lands, at no cost and with no signup.
- Access 2026, on library systems.Speaking on what an accessibility audit actually catches in the systems libraries run.
The newsletter
AI Learning, Keeping It Human.
A weekly, honest read on learning and working with AI, for people who want to keep the human in it. Every Thursday, the one thing that actually mattered that week, and what it means for how we teach and learn.
From the writing
Thinking out loud, in public.
Behind the scenes: the week I moved half my site out of the house
Themes, plugins, resources, and tools got their own domains. Columns went to a writing site. Apex left WordPress for flat HTML on Cloudflare Pages. The front door finally…
Behind the Scenes: a training site moves, a Cloudflare redirect never fires, and I publish too soon
A training site moved to its own domain, a Cloudflare redirect rule that never fired, twelve guide articles, and a newsletter I published before its own review finished.
LMS deployment in 2026: what most teams get wrong
An LMS solves tracking and compliance well; delivery and content management poorly. Here are the four flavours that dominate, the decision matrix, and the audit before you sign.
What clients say
“Entertaining and engaging talk – more directed to WordPress developers and consultants – was hoping for a little more about how people using WordPress as a platform can make money.”Doug Millington
“This is absolute gem of a presentation by Chris Ross which proves yet again that you can still earn a decent wage by providing VALUE to people for free.”Lorne Fade
Tell me what you’re building.
I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person for it, and if I’m not, who is.
No sales calls · Reply the next business day · No minimum project size
Small business work
Small business?
Websites and local search for small businesses now live at my small-business practices, listed at Lakeview Brands.
Closest to the studio: Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Welland, and St. Catharines. Or see every place I serve.