When the Human Made team set out to redesign and relaunch our own website earlier this year, we had two main goals: to create a faster, more flexible experience for visitors, and to give our content and design team more control over managing the site and how it evolves.
We didn’t want to over-engineer it.
As a WordPress agency known for building enterprise-level sites, it can be tempting to create everything from scratch with a custom build. But sometimes, the best engineering choice is to use what already works. The Ollie Pro theme, built entirely with Full Site Editing (FSE) in mind, offered the right balance between solid foundations and creative flexibility.
Since launching, we’ve not only used Ollie for our own site but also introduced it to several client projects — proving that you don’t always need a “from the ground up” custom build to deliver a beautiful, performant site.
Here are five things we achieved in the process.
1. A flexible foundation built for modern workflows
One of the first things we noticed was how easy it is to maintain a consistent visual style across the entire site. Ollie’s extensive pattern library helped make it easy to build pages efficiently whilst keeping your branding and site design consistent across pages.
For example, instead of manually setting font sizes or margins in individual blocks, we can adjust them once – globally – and know every page, post, and template will follow suit. This makes maintaining a site both faster and more consistent.
Ollie isn’t trying to reinvent WordPress, and that’s exactly why we like it.
It’s designed to complement core FSE functionality, providing a well-structured starting point that works seamlessly with patterns, templates, and style variations. This helped us move quickly in the early stages of the redesign while maintaining full creative control.
“Ollie gives us a solid foundation to build from without getting in the way. It’s flexible enough for developers, but also intuitive for content teams.” – Pawel Mikolajek, Designer at Human Made
2. Design consistency, without custom CSS
Using Block Editor’s global styles and Ollie’s extensive pattern library, we could easily apply consistent typography, colour, and spacing across every part of the site — no repetitive adjustments, or extra CSS.
Instead of reinventing components, we built upon existing patterns, tailoring them to match our refreshed visual identity. This made the process both faster and more maintainable.
“As an engineering focused agency it’s easy to over-engineer our personal website and end up not meeting the needs of our marketing team. I think using Ollie has been really successful in allowing our marketing team to have consistency and become more efficient” – Matthew Haines-Young, Engineering Manager at Human Made
3. Complete control with Full Site Editing
One of the biggest wins of the redesign has been how much ownership our marketing and content team now has over the site.
Combining the Ollie theme and FSE features, we can customise menu headers, footers, and templates directly in the Site Editor, without writing a single line of PHP. Updating the navigation no longer requires developer input now that we’re utilising the simple UI of Ollie’s Menu Designer — something our team really appreciates.
4. Built-in responsiveness that works
Ollie’s responsive design system, including advanced column controls and flexible, mix and match styles, mean our landing pages have a seamless experience across devices from day one.
Rather than manually managing breakpoints, the theme’s defaults work hand-in-hand with FSE’s layout tools. The result: a site that feels polished and balanced on every screen size, without the need for additional CSS.
5. Increased performance
Utilising FSE features mixed with Ollie’s easy to use style patterns and theme, we’re able to keep our site lightweight and performant. No heavy frameworks, no redundant scripts — just clean, efficient code.
That simplicity translates to faster load times, improved accessibility, and easier long-term maintenance. It’s a reminder that future-ready doesn’t have to mean complex, sometimes it’s about choosing tools that evolve alongside the platform.
Our site now loads faster, uses fewer dependencies, and performs more consistently across devices. Combined with modern image handling and efficient markup, the result is a noticeably smoother user experience — both for visitors and for our content editors working in the backend.
Final thoughts
For us, using Ollie wasn’t about taking shortcuts, it was about working smarter.
Using the theme allowed us to focus on what really matters: great content, solid performance, and a design system that can grow with us. More importantly, it’s a testament to how powerful Full Site Editing has become, giving teams the tools to build beautiful, consistent, and flexible websites using the core WordPress experience.
As early adopters of FSE, we’re excited to keep exploring how themes like Ollie can help our clients do the same: move faster, collaborate better, and make WordPress work harder for them.
Explore the benefits of WordPress Full Site Editing and how we use it for client projects.