Emmily Peterson

Emmily Petersen is a senior WordPress engineer, front-end developer, and accessibility-focused technologist with more than a decade of experience designing and building custom digital platforms for nonprofits, mission-driven organizations, creative studios, and education clients. She specializes in custom WordPress architecture, Gutenberg block development, accessible UI engineering, and clean, maintainable code that empowers clients to manage their sites with confidence.

At Avidano Digital, as our resident Web Developer, Emm brings a rare blend of engineering precision, UX sensitivity, and client-centered communication. She excels at translating ambitious design concepts into performant, stable, and intuitive digital experiences. Her work is grounded in accessibility and sustainability—ensuring that every build is WCAG-compliant, future-ready, and easy for organizations to maintain without heavy engineering dependency.

Before joining Avidano Digital, Emm spent five years as a WordPress Developer at Friendly Design Co, where she architected and built more than 20 custom WordPress websites using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), custom post types, custom taxonomies, and reusable component systems. She developed a full conference scheduling platform—from speaker profiles to sponsor listings—replacing a costly third-party plugin while improving performance and user experience. She also implemented accessibility standards across multiple government and education projects, ensuring every site met WCAG compliance requirements.

Emm’s engineering approach is rooted in process excellence. She streamlined development workflows using the Sage framework, built internal component libraries to improve cross-project consistency, and produced detailed documentation and video walkthroughs that allowed clients to manage their content independently. She also led client trainings, providing hands-on WordPress guidance, and collaborated closely with designers to maintain aesthetic integrity while adhering to technical best practices.

Prior to that, Emm served as a Web Developer + Designer at bluespace creative, where she managed full project lifecycles and acted as the connective tissue between clients, designers, and developers. She introduced a WordPress-first workflow that helped transition the team away from long .NET builds and toward a sustainable, high-output development model—delivering multiple custom WordPress projects each quarter. She also created new revenue streams through hosting resell services, documented internal systems to improve efficiency, and mentored junior developers on WordPress best practices.

A multidisciplinary creative at her core, Emm holds a BFA in Graphic Design and an Associate Degree in Graphic Design, Illustration, and Computer Graphics, giving her an unusually strong design-to-development perspective. She is fluent in modern front-end technologies—HTML5, CSS/SASS, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, jQuery, Bootstrap, Tailwind—and deeply experienced in build tools, CI/CD pipelines, Docker environments, and performance optimization aligned with Core Web Vitals.

Emm believes deeply in the power of accessible, mission-driven design. Known for her thoughtful communication, her “clean code first” philosophy, and her enthusiasm for helping organizations understand and own their digital tools, she brings both technical expertise and genuine care to every project. She is happiest when she’s building systems that make the web more inclusive, more intuitive, and more human.