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.
Here’s a quick rundown of the tools and elements that I used to design and build the site. They have changed completely in 2025.
How Pixelyzed.com Was Created and Built
The site’s original design and graphics were created by me for this version based in part on previous 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.
As of this version (7.0 – 2025), Pixelyzed.com is now powered by Bricks Builder which we now use exclusively in my agency. I love this theme because it supports modern web development methods like the class-first system, tokenization and the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principles. Other than editor styles, no custom CSS was written in my child theme. Most syling is now handled by the Automatic.css framework which helps give all elements a much better visual consistency and enabled me to work on the new design with it and Bricks very quickly.
PHPStorm is still used for more involved or plugin specific PHP coding but the need for that is greatly diminished when using 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 I’ve 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 it’s 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 content’s 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, there’s a complete canonical separation of content (very important for SEO). It also improves performance as each language’s 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 WordPress’ 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 2025 version of Pixelyzed.com.
Thank you for visiting!
