Studio
A website you can still edit in five years.
Xena is a WordPress site for shared hosting: native blocks, system fonts, and vanilla CSS. No page builder. No npm. No plugin stack that expires.
What we ship
Services
01
Strategy
Decide what the site must do before a single page is built. Fewer features, clearer pages, cheaper hosting.
02
Design
Editorial layouts that live in the Site Editor. Colors and type are theme.json tokens, not a locked Figma export.
03
Build
PHP and CSS you can read. WordPress core does the rest. When PHP is updated in cPanel, the site should still boot.
Approach
Own the files. Borrow nothing you cannot replace.
Third-party libraries go stale. Page builders lock content. Font CDNs fail. Xena is built so the only moving parts are WordPress itself and the PHP version your host provides.
Edit copy in the Site Editor. Change colors in theme.json. Upload through cPanel when you need to. That is the whole operating model.
0
Page builders and extra plugins required to run the site.
1
Codebase you upload to public_html and can read without a build step.
5+
Years this stack is meant to stay boring and updateable.
Selected work
Membership
Ledger
Private journal for a research group. Core users, native forms, no membership plugin.
Editorial
Northline
Magazine layout for a regional review. Query loops and system serif, no gallery plugin.
Services
Harbor
Brochure site for a coastal practice. Contact form in the theme, mail through the host.
Product
Fieldnote
Launch journal for a hardware studio. Static pages plus a native blog, uploaded over FTP.
They refused the plugin stack everyone else recommended. Two years later we still update WordPress itself, and nothing else has broken.
Maya Chen, Harbor