For those who might be interested, Pixelyzed.com is now at its 7th major iteration. It has gone through several phases through the years as my interests and expertise have evolved. On the technological side, the site has been powered by WordPress since April 2010.
Hereās a quick rundown of the tools and elements that I used to design and build the site. They have changed completely in early 2025 and again late in the year and early 2026.
How Pixelyzed.com Was Created and Built
The siteās original design and graphics were created by me for this version based in part on older versions for the colors and are an evolution of the previous version in terms of the layout. The design is NOT provided by a pre-designed WordPress theme or a pre-made global template of any kind.
For this version (7.0), Pixelyzed.com was originally built with Bricks Builder which has been the main tool I use in my agency since mid 2024. But in late 2025, I started the process of rebuilding this site again in the new next-era visual development environment tool called Etch. I love Etch because it enforces modern web development methods like the CSS class-first system, tokenization and the DRY (Donāt Repeat Yourself) principles. All of this with the goal of creating more scalable, maintainable and accessible web sites. The Etch theme uses an FSE workflow and the builder (which is a plugin) authors everything directly to Gutenberg blocks with 100% display accuracy in the block editor. But the theme itself is very minimal and my child theme is basically empty.
Most styling is now mostly handled by the Automatic.css framework which I also use with Bricks and it helps give the design a much better visual consistency across elements and pages and enabled me to work on the new design quickly as it automates a lot of spacing, typography and colour aspects automatically while remaining 100% editable and flexible.
PHPStorm is still used for more involved or plugin specific PHP coding but the need for that is greatly diminished when using Etch or Bricks. This design is an evolution of the previous version in terms of layout but a complete departure for colors and typography.
Making Pixelyzed.com Bilingual
This site was made bilingual in its previous 6.0 iteration. As Iāve been doing for all our multilingual client sites since 2010, I implemented the multilingual feature with the WordPress multisite functionality instead of a dedicated plugin like WPML. For me itās by far the simplest way to build multilingual sites as everything remains basically 100% native WordPress other than the addition of one simple free plugin (Multisite Language Switcher) that adds one meta box with one drop down field per additional language in the editing screens of pages and posts to select that contentās equivalent in other languages and link them.
In my experience, this solution brings the least potential of conflicts or other technical issues compared to the usual multilingual plugins but, also, thereās a complete canonical separation of content (very important for SEO). It also improves performance as each languageās sub-site in the multisite network gets its own set of database tables for wp_posts and wp_posts_meta instead of the garbled mess most plugins like WPML create. With multisite, all contents in different languages are cleanly separated and can be managed more easily and again, directly in WordPressā native UI and not the often arcane UIs of multilingual plugins which may or may not support the specific plugins or theme you are using. This had a significant impact in my agency as this made it easier to train our clients in using their sites and managing their various contents.
I will keep tweaking things in the coming months but I really hope you like the new 2026 version of Pixelyzed.com.
Thank you for visiting!