Outcomes lead, tech follows
The stack serves the outcome. WordPress is usually the right answer because it wins on total cost and content workflow. When it isn't, I'll tell you up front and point you at the right tool.
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About
I build sites that work in year three
the way they worked in week one
Front-end and WordPress developer. Outcomes-first builds for service businesses — faster, ranks better, converts more, and engineered to age well.
Who you'd be working with
Hi, I'm Alec
I'm a front-end and WordPress developer with a B.S. in Web Development and a minor in Software Engineering from Brigham Young University–Idaho. I've built, optimized and maintained sites for agencies, healthcare organizations and local businesses, five of them here in Rexburg, usually as the bridge between design, development and marketing, because those three rarely speak the same language on their own.
Day to day I'm the Front-End Web Developer at Hangar Marketing, where I manage a creative team. Willits Forge is the work I take on directly.
It started because people kept asking. A client would put me on to a friend who had a question about their site, and answering it turned into explaining it, and explaining it turned into just fixing it. I've made well over a hundred small edits to sites that aren't listed anywhere here — updates I didn't charge for and never wrote up. Somebody asked, so I helped.
At some point that stopped being a favor and became the thing I do. I registered Willits Forge in May 2020.
- B.S. Web Development, minor in Software Engineering Brigham Young University–Idaho.
- Front-End Web Developer at Hangar Marketing Managing a creative team of web developers, a designer, a videographer and a copywriter.
- Full-stack background MEAN, .NET and PHP/MySQL — so the front end I hand you plays nicely with whatever sits behind it.
- SEO tooling, day to day Yoast SEO, SEMrush, Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- Extensive WordPress, Divi, Elementor and custom plugin experience Including hospital-scale builds and a custom plugin and REST API of my own.
- Proficient in Spanish And experienced working with diverse teams.
Why I build this way
Most sites are launched, demoed, and never thought about again
By year two they're slow. By year three the editor is locked up, the contact form quietly broke six months ago and nobody noticed, and the rankings have slid. That's the pattern I'm working against. Sites get built as a deliverable — signed off, handed over, done — when what the owner needs is something that keeps running for years.
So I build them to age. Source-controlled, documented, tuned for speed, and handed over in a state you can run yourself. Launch is where a site starts earning, and most of that earning happens in the years after it.
The test I care about comes three years later. Does it still do its job, and can the next developer open it and see what I did?
A client once wanted everything above the fold — every service, the whole menu, all of it visible before you scroll. I didn't think it would work, so I built it both ways and let them see the difference.
What I didn't plan for was what came after. They went back in and changed the pages themselves, broke the site, and didn't tell me. It was down for two days before I caught it.
So I built a tool to let me know when a site goes down. It's in the Lab: a dashboard that polls the sites I look after and says which ones are up. It exists because of those two days.
The work that ships should be work I'd want to inherit three years from now. — Alec Willits
How I work
Four things you can count on
These are the trade-offs I commit to on every project, and they show up in every site that ships.
Built to age well
Source-controlled, documented, no plugin sprawl. The site you launch should be the site still running in three years with minimal hand-holding. The next developer to open it shouldn't curse my name.
Performance is non-negotiable
Core Web Vitals tuning, asset optimization, cache strategy, image discipline. Production load-time drops of 50% or more are the baseline I won't ship without.
Honest scope, honest timelines
If a request is going to balloon, you'll hear about it early. If the right answer is “don’t build this”, that's the answer you get — and sometimes it is, because plenty of sites that look like they need a redesign really need better content. No agency fog, no scope creep buried in a change order.
By the numbers
50+
Sites shipped
Agencies, healthcare and local service businesses.
10+
Years on the web
Front-end, back-end, and the marketing side of both.
Hospital
Scale delivered
Regional healthcare, with the accessibility bar that carries.
1
Business day
How long you wait for a reply. Every time.
Beyond WordPress
The half you can't see from a portfolio
Outside client hours I build Python services, native Android apps, local language-model infrastructure and developer tooling — including a WordPress plugin and REST API of my own, and a self-hosted AI platform I've been extending for over a year.
Off the clock
Why I still enjoy this
I like this work for the same reason I like any kind of building: you take a rough idea, shape it, and end up with something solid that holds up under use. The rest of my time goes to my wife and our two boys, and to being outside in Idaho as often as the weather allows.
Need a site that earns its keep?
Send a note with what you're trying to build. You'll get an honest take on timeline, cost, and what would actually work — not a generic discovery deck.