MMAPS

• What they do Maintenance and construction management consulting, and a set of Excel-based management toolkits
• What I built A seven page WordPress site on a theme written by hand, with no page builder
• Live 19 August 2026
• Visit mmaps.co.nz

mmaps.co.nz

The situation

MMAPS is a technical consultancy with forty years of material behind it: maintenance service delivery models, outsourcing process flowcharts, construction quality management diagrams, a review questionnaire that generates its own charts. Almost all of it lived in PowerPoint and PDF, and the website in front of it was a stock Avada theme running Fusion Builder and LayerSlider.

The problem wasn't that the old site looked dated. It was that the substance of the business, the thing a prospective client would actually want to see, was locked inside downloads.

What I did

• Wrote a WordPress theme from scratch. No parent theme, no Avada, no Fusion Builder, no LayerSlider, no page builder of any kind. The finished site runs on three plugins rather than a builder stack.
• Rebuilt seven pages: home, asset maintenance, reviews, construction, about, toolkit and contact.
• Rendered Hugh's PowerPoint diagrams into proper web figures at consistent widths, centred, with click to enlarge, instead of leaving them as things you have to download to read.
• Ran a mobile and tablet audit across all seven pages at 375, 412, 768 and 1024 pixels before launch, and fixed what it turned up rather than filing it.
• Wrote a cutover runbook, took database backups either side of the move, and ran a post-launch review a day later against the live domain.
• Kept the old toolkit PDFs resolving at their existing addresses, so the links already out there in the world didn't break on launch day.

The detail worth telling

Partway through, Hugh asked whether the job might be fairer on hourly rates than on the fixed quote he'd already accepted. I agreed, in writing, that the quote had buffer in it and that hourly was fairer both ways. It cost me money on that job.

I'd rather have the client who asks me that question and gets a straight answer, because that client is still here in five years. The alternative is a slightly better invoice and a relationship that only works while nobody looks at it too closely.

What they got

A seven page site that puts the technical material on the page instead of behind a download, on a theme MMAPS owns outright, with no page builder licence to renew and no builder plugin to go unsupported in three years.

It's a WordPress site, not a static one, because Hugh needs to edit his own content. The difference from what was there before is that the theme is code rather than a settings panel, so it does what it's told and nothing else.

★★★★★

Elijah developed MMAPS website and was very helpful, proactive and innovative in so doing. I'd have no hesitation in recommending him to others with similar needs.