My first client work was WordPress, and that was the right call

March 2022. Seven months earlier I had started two things in the same month: a Computer Science degree at Thammasat University and a part-time developer job at my family's trophy factory, which had been making and plating awards in Pathum Thani since 2006. The factory wanted a proper site for its plaque and award line. That build became RS Award — my first real client project, even though the client shared my last name.

I was a first-year student who wanted to write code, and I chose not to. I picked WordPress — hosting, a theme, a plugin stack — and I have spent time since then deciding whether that was a cop-out. It was not. It was the right call, and I want to be precise about why, because the honest reasons are less flattering than "the best tool for the job".

//Why WordPress, when I was studying to write code

The honest inventory of March 2022: one developer, working RUAMSUK PLATING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP hours around a full course load, inside a business that had been selling awards for sixteen years and still ran most of its workflows manually. Nobody was waiting on an application. The business needed a catalog it could sell against — pages, photos, Thai-language copy, and search visibility. Written as requirements, the job looked like this:

• A browsable catalog of plaques, shields, and award products
• Content pages the business could update without a code deploy
• Thai-language copy with on-page SEO that could rank for real buyer searches
• Landing pages for Google Ads campaigns to point at
• A stack one part-time student could stand up, run, and not break during exam weeks

Nothing on that list is an application. There is no login, no checkout, no data model worth owning. In 2022 I could have turned it into one anyway — spent months learning a JavaScript framework, a deployment pipeline, and a CMS integration on the company's time — and delivered a worse catalog, later. WordPress collapsed almost all of it into configuration plus a theme.

//Three months, four milestones

The build ran on a monthly cadence, because that is what part-time hours allow. March was discovery and setup: hosting, the theme base, and the plugin stack. April was design — a showcase theme aligned to the factory's brand, and the site structure. May was the build-out: the award catalog, the content pages, and the CMS workflows for keeping them current. June was launch, with on-page SEO, analytics, and ad tracking wired in from day one. That launch scope was deliberate: the site's whole job was to be found. A catalog nobody searches for is a brochure, so the go-live checklist was more marketing than engineering — titles and descriptions that matched how Thai buyers actually search for plaques, analytics to prove whether any of it worked, and tracking so the ad spend could be judged instead of guessed at.

// child-theme/functions.php — customize here, never in the parent
add_action("wp_enqueue_scripts", function () {
	wp_enqueue_style(
		"parent-style",
		get_template_directory_uri() . "/style.css"
	);
});

The discipline that mattered most was barely code at all: keep every customization in a child theme and treat the parent theme and the plugins as replaceable vendor parts, so updates stay boring. Most of what I actually shipped was closer to information architecture than engineering — deciding how a customer asks for a plaque, and making the catalog answer in those terms.

//The part that felt like a step backward

I want to argue against my own title for a moment, because the costs were real. WordPress taught me very little of what my degree was busy teaching — I assembled more than I engineered. The stack had a performance ceiling I could feel and a plugin surface I did not fully control. And the endgame was already written: every WordPress build I shipped for the company was eventually replaced. This one lasted until December 2025, when I began remaking it ground-up in Next.js with structured data and Thai localization, and retired WordPress from the project entirely.

But the fair comparison is not WordPress versus the remake. The remake was built by someone with years of shipped storefronts behind him. The March 2022 version of me did not exist yet as an engineer — he existed as a student with a factory that needed a website. WordPress versus what I could actually build then was not a close contest.

//What the boring stack bought

It held. The WordPress build carried rs-award.com from the March 2022 start until the remake began — about three years and nine months — and the playbook proved repeatable: RS Medal followed on the same foundation five months later, and a WooCommerce storefront for the trophy line came in 2023. Three storefronts, one boring recipe.

It also taught the layer that outlived it. On-page SEO, analytics, and Google Ads were learned against real Thai search traffic, on sites whose rankings the business felt directly. The frameworks I use changed completely between 2022 and now. The SEO work transferred untouched. And the site was never really the point on its own — it was the first visible piece of a longer job, moving a business that had run manually for sixteen years onto web-based systems, one workflow at a time. A catalog the factory could update itself was a small step in that direction, but it was the first one that customers could see.

Right call never meant best stack. It meant the stack whose failure modes matched my situation: limited hours, a real business waiting, and a first-year student's skills. I have made fancier technology decisions since. Few of them were as correct.