A community site moved to a modern theme without losing its look

The problem

The site had been built on a Genesis child theme with custom post types and taxonomies for tutorials, held together by plugins written for the classic editor. Designers submitted tutorials through a front-end form, but one of its fields never reached the edit screen. Author photos in the sidebar came out blurry no matter how sharp the upload. The owner wanted the site to look and work exactly as before, on Kadence and blocks.

What we did

• Rebuilt the theme on Kadence Pro on a staging copy, carrying over the colours, author pages and layouts.
• Kept the custom content model, so every existing tutorial, type and designer stayed where it was.
• Moved tutorial submission to the block editor and fixed the field that was not being saved.
• Fixed the image size behind the blurry author photos.
• Reviewed every plugin with the owner, explaining what each did and which could go, rather than removing things on assumption.

Because the live site kept running during the rebuild, we asked the owner to keep a log of changes she made in the meantime, so nothing was lost when the new version went live.

Results

• A modern, block-based site that looks like the one its community already knew.
• Submissions that save every field designers fill in.
• A smaller, understood set of plugins.

Client name and site withheld at our discretion. Details are taken from the project record.