Robin Metcalfe

I help agencies deliver CMS products that really work

15 years experience building UX and admin panels for agency clients. Content management systems - I know them inside out. Specialising in Laravel & WordPress.
Creativity/interactivity

Hi, I’m Robin. I’ve got 15 years experience working with product design agencies, here in the UK and abroad.

I specialise in delivering technical CMS products for agency clients: editorial control, database access, CRMs and more.

I work embedded within agency teams, white-labelled if necessary, or as a named consultant they can bring into pitches. I won’t embarrass you.

I work with agency partners to define deliverables, milestones and completion parameters. I keep the surprises small throughout.

I’m a steady hand at every stage of the project, from initial prototype through to long-term partnership.

Want to see your CMS project take flight?

Agencies struggle with…

3 Terrifying Tales

Too Many Plugins

You scroll, and the plugin list keeps going. Three pages deep, and you’re not even sure when half of them were installed. Admin-bar warnings gather at the top of the screen, waiting.

Admin Your Team Avoids

They approached the login page with a familiar dread. What would go wrong this time? Would an update crash the site again, the way it had before? Only time would tell.

Fields With No Plan

You have been scrolling the fields for some time now. They all look the same. Was this one here before? The page hums. There is no end in sight, and no way back up. You are no longer sure anyone designed this.

How I fix this
1
Audit every plugin: what it does, and whether it earns its place.
Watch what the content team actually edits, day to day.
Start with the content: what exists and how it relates.
2
Strip back to a small, vetted core. Anything critical, rebuilt in code you own.
Design the back-end around just that: the fields they need, defaults, guardrails.
Build a reusable model, with validation so the content stays consistent.
3
Updates run on staging first, with a backup and one-click rollback before go-live.
Test it with the people who’ll use it, and tune until it’s quick to update.
New pages assemble from parts that already fit.

Too Many Plugins

You scroll, and the plugin list keeps going. Three pages deep, and you’re not even sure when half of them were installed. Admin-bar warnings gather at the top of the screen, waiting.

  1. 1Audit every plugin: what it does, and whether it earns its place.
  2. 2Strip back to a small, vetted core. Anything critical, rebuilt in code you own.
  3. 3Updates run on staging first, with a backup and one-click rollback before go-live.

Admin Your Team Avoids

They approached the login page with a familiar dread. What would go wrong this time? Would an update crash the site again, the way it had before? Only time would tell.

  1. 1Watch what the content team actually edits, day to day.
  2. 2Design the back-end around just that: the fields they need, defaults, guardrails.
  3. 3Test it with the people who’ll use it, and tune until it’s quick to update.

Fields With No Plan

You have been scrolling the fields for some time now. They all look the same. Was this one here before? The page hums. There is no end in sight, and no way back up. You are no longer sure anyone designed this.

  1. 1Start with the content: what exists and how it relates.
  2. 2Build a reusable model, with validation so the content stays consistent.
  3. 3New pages assemble from parts that already fit.

Case Studies

Recent agency and client work

Agency Studio Simpatico

Pulling Salesforce data into WordPress listings

I helped the agency Studio Simpatico build a two-way pipeline between a complex Salesforce events catalogue and a WordPress front-end for a performing-arts foundation.

WordPress

Client Journalism non-profit

I managed WordPress infrastructure and development

During my WordPress partnership with a journalism non-profit, I modernised their block setup and aligned the publishing flow with how their editorial team works.

WordPress

Agency Edinburgh design agency

Embedded freelance developer, two days a week

Two and a half years as the embedded freelance developer for a small Edinburgh design agency working across branding, packaging and print, on their client sites and their own.

WordPress
View all case studies →

I build on Laravel & WordPress

I've worked with these framework powerhouses for years. They always deliver when required, and can be tailored for a wide range of use cases.

How I work with each →

Experiments

Side projects with real purpose

What If Mars Had Oceans?

A real-data Mars water-level visualiser. Drag the slider, the planet actually floods the way the elevation data says it would.

Agency skills Interactives data visualisation animation

AI-Native CMS

Six Verticals, One Engine

A single CMS that produces six wildly different finished sites (allotment, charity, council, museum, scout group, theatre) by tuning an LLM per vertical.

Agency skills CMS architecture AI integration prototype-to-production

Bettermojis

Every Glyph, No Faff

A no-faff browser for ~7,000 emoji, HTML entities and named Unicode symbols. Search in 15 languages, click to copy. Pure client-side.

Agency skills UI app design vanilla-JS performance
View all experiments →
Hire me

Let's talk.

Inherited stack, complex integration, project that wants a senior hand? Tell me what you're working on.

Replies from hello@solarise.dev. Pricing on request.