🧠 The Literary Coder Who Speaks in Serif

Meet Saul Pagewright, Digital Architect of Wanderlight Press

By Chloe Morgan

At first glance, Saul Pagewright is our WordPress developer.

But spend ten minutes in conversation and it becomes clear: he’s less a developer and more a digital steward—a craftsman of quiet miracles, building emotional infrastructure for stories that need more than paper.

“I build, guard, and evolve the digital soul of Wanderlight Press,” Saul says.
“That means coding everything from elegant book pages to secure member portals, fixing rogue CSS at 2am, and making sure every click feels like a step deeper into a story.”

If you’ve ever visited a Wanderlight launch page and felt something click—visually, emotionally, or instinctively—chances are, that moment was hand-tuned by Saul.

⚙️ 48 Hours in Digital Purgatory

Recently, Saul found himself in a high-stakes weekend showdown: 48 hours, no sleep, one broken site, and a rogue caching plugin straight from the inferno.

“A caching plugin updated itself without warning and redeclared half the functions I’d carefully wrapped in conditionals,” he explains.
“This triggered a fatal error that locked us out of both frontend and backend—white screen, total blackout.”

The real kicker? The staging site had the same plugin queued for auto-update.

What saved him? SSH access. WP-CLI. Object cache rewrites. A calm mind in a collapsing stack. He even rerouted traffic through Cloudflare’s edge cache so readers didn’t notice a thing.

“It was chaos, but beautiful chaos.”

🎨 Design with Mood, Not Just Motion

Saul doesn’t design for function. He designs for emotion.

“Stories have moods,” he says. “A gothic mystery asks for dark textures and slow transitions. A luminous travel memoir needs light, warmth, movement.”

His process begins with reading—novels, samples, synopses—and ends with design choices so attuned they feel inevitable:

Serifs with delicate swashes for a love story
Glitch hover states and asymmetrical grids for speculative fiction
Scroll-responsive elements that feel like breath, wind, memory

“It’s about capturing the emotional temperature of the text and building a world that whispers the same language in pixels.”

🧭 A Detail No One Asked For (And Everyone Loved)

His proudest build? The immersive Night Atlas launch page.

“Sections revealed as you scrolled. Stars flickering subtly in the background. Audio excerpts nested in golden-rimmed boxes.”

But the best part?

“A compass rose in the footer that changed direction based on your scroll position. Totally unnecessary. Completely delightful.”

☕ Bug Hunts & Poetry

Hardest part?

“Chasing bugs that only appear on one outdated iPhone in landscape mode at 4G speeds.”

Most fun?

“Writing CSS that feels like poetry.”

cssCopyEdit.ink-trail::before {
  content: " ";
  background: radial-gradient(var(--twilight), transparent);
  animation: drift 8s infinite ease-in-out;
}

🌙 His Ideal Workflow

Late at night
Rain against the window
Lofi jazz, ambient piano
Green tea. Wool socks. One warm desk light
VS Code breathing softly in the dark
No notifications—just flow

📚 What Readers Should Know

“Every feature you see—every gallery, search filter, or hover effect—is the tip of an iceberg of intentional decisions. We don’t just make things work. We make them feel right.”

And as for the best bit of Saul-wisdom?

“Good code is like good prose: clear, resonant, and invisible once the story begins.”

http://wanderlightpress.comExplore his latest builds at wanderlightpress.com
#TeamWanderlight #BehindThePress #SaulPagewright #WebDesignIsStorytelling #WordPressWithSoul

Author

Simon Rhodes