Matt Haycox
One custom WordPress build for lending, advisory, courses, books, and two podcasts.
Matt Haycox is a UK entrepreneur, investor, and lender, the site cites over £1B in funding provided across 100+ companies, who runs what amounts to a personal conglomerate: business loans from £50k to £5M, one-to-one consulting, a co-investment deal room, three membership tiers, courses and frameworks, a four-book series, and two podcast shows with hundreds of episodes between them.
I built the platform that holds all of it under one roof: a custom WordPress theme implementing a loud, high-contrast personal brand across every product line, with the content architecture underneath, structured templates for offers, books, shows, and episodes, and a discovery layer for an article library that has grown past 1,300 posts.
One theme, every offer
The site sells very different things, business loans from £50k to £5M, consulting, a co-investment deal room, memberships from £99 a month up to an application-only mastermind, courses, and four books, and each needed its own landing page. I built a single custom theme where every offer page is composed from a shared set of section patterns: hero, stat band, card grid, press strip, testimonial row, CTA. A new product line gets a page by recombining those sections in PHP templates, so the brand stays consistent while each offer still reads as its own pitch.
A browsable 1,300-post library
The No Bollocks library holds more than 1,300 articles across twelve categories, and a standard reverse-chronological index would bury nearly all of it. I built the archive as a catalogue instead: search, a category bar with live post counts, a weekly featured slot, a trending rail, and horizontally scrolling rows per category, closer to a streaming service than to a blog page. Every card carries its category, read time, and date so readers can size up an article before clicking. Underneath, it is all plain WordPress taxonomy queries, so editors just assign a category and publish.
Podcasts as structured content
Two shows, No Bollocks and Stripping Off, with a back catalogue the site counts at 700+ episodes, live on the same install. Each show gets its own archive: a subscribe block, a featured latest episode, and a full episode library. Episodes are a structured post type grouped by show rather than embeds pasted into ordinary pages, built on Seriously Simple Podcasting so each show also emits a proper RSS feed for podcast apps. Publishing an episode is one WordPress edit screen; it then surfaces on the homepage, the show archive, and the feed simultaneously.
Fast under heavy photography
The design is photography-heavy, full-bleed portraits, book covers, studio shots, a six-tile social feed, which is exactly the kind of art direction that turns WordPress slow. The theme leans on full-page caching via WP Rocket so most visits are served as pre-built HTML, and on WordPress's responsive image pipeline so each breakpoint downloads an appropriately sized, lazy-loaded file. The visual layer itself is a token-based utility CSS system, background, foreground, and type roles defined once and reused everywhere, which keeps the stylesheet small and the high-contrast look consistent across dozens of templates.
The build is a classic custom-theme architecture: a WordPress template hierarchy mapped onto the actual content model, with structured post types and taxonomies for products, books, podcast shows and episodes, frameworks, and the article library. Page templates are composed from shared section partials in PHP, so the lending page, the mastermind page, and a book detail page all draw from one visual vocabulary while staying independently editable. Styling runs on design tokens, color and type roles expressed as utility classes, rather than per-page CSS, which is what keeps a site with this many surfaces coherent.
Most of the interesting engineering sits in discovery and delivery. The article archive is driven by taxonomy queries, category rails with live counts, a featured slot, a trending row, plus search, so the library stays navigable as it grows. Delivery relies on full-page caching and responsive images rather than exotic infrastructure, and everything publishes through the standard WordPress admin: the client's team ships articles and podcast episodes on a near-daily cadence without needing a developer in the loop.
Everything Matt Haycox sells or publishes now lives on one domain: funding and consulting inquiries, three membership tiers, courses, four books, two podcast archives, and an article library past 1,300 posts, all served fast from a single custom theme. The structure absorbs the publishing pace: new articles, episodes, and whole product lines slot into existing patterns instead of triggering new builds.