London Accident News
A London news publication covering accidents and public safety — built as a fully custom WordPress platform its editorial team can run without a developer on call.
A newsroom look, without a newsroom budget
London Accident News needed a publication that could stand next to established news brands: a dense, editorial front page, category-driven browsing, and article pages built for long reads. It also needed to run on WordPress — the editorial workflow, scheduling, and category management had to work for writers, not developers.
Off-the-shelf news themes get you eighty percent of the look and none of the identity. So we built the identity: a custom design system on a child theme, and every homepage section as its own configurable widget.
What we shipped
Twelve bespoke Elementor widgets
The entire front page is custom: a hero news grid, breaking-news ticker, filterable story feed, category highlight blocks, masonry grids, trending sidebar, newsletter section, and a full article template — every one built as a reusable widget the editorial team can place and configure without touching code.
A color-coded editorial system
Six news categories — road accidents, workplace, transport, legal, health & safety, opinion — each with its own accent color carried through badges, archives, and article headers, so readers always know where they are.
Pinterest-style archives
Category and search pages use a responsive masonry layout with a featured lead story, styled pagination, and per-category newsletter prompts — a custom PHP template, not a page-builder layout, so it stays fast at any archive depth.
Search that actually finds things
A custom results template paired with live autocomplete on every search bar on the site — readers get suggestions as they type, and empty results offer category suggestions instead of a dead end.
Built to be handed over
Everything ships as a child theme plus one custom plugin, so updates never overwrite the work. Archive and search pages are plain PHP templates — no page-builder overhead where speed matters most — while the homepage stays fully editable through the widgets. The editorial team writes, categorizes, and publishes; the platform does the rest.
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