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Likewize

Likewize resolves 250 million tech problems annually, protecting and repairing devices for the world’s largest telcos, retailers and banks. Yet, their digital presence failed to reflect this immense scale.

Facing a tight Mobile World Congress deadline, inconsistent product data and fragmented design assets, Likewize needed a modern web architecture to establish immediate industry authority, scale globally and act as a dynamic springboard for a sweeping brand evolution without sacrificing performance.

likewize.com
A promotional graphic with a central focus on a laptop displaying a home screen with various app icons and widgets.
Two individuals sitting on the floor, one of them holding a smartphone and the other looking at the screen.
A user interface for a support service, featuring a smart home device and a message from a user named Anna.

Balancing technical power & user adoption

By rebuilding WordPress from a clean slate, we aligned enterprise scalability with immediate internal adoption.

Evaluating Likewize’s requirements triggered an architectural debate. Headless platforms offer excellent front-end flexibility but introduce an overhead that can alienate content editors already familiar with WordPress. Conversely, traditional monolithic WordPress setups offer editorial comfort, but inherit an unmanaged ecosystem of plugins and technical debt that fractures under enterprise scale.

Read our field note: We build by leaving things out

Instead of forcing a dogmatic choice, we engineered a hybrid advantage via a clean-slate WordPress build. We developed a lightweight component library to champion the visual direction from brand partner SomeOne, alongside an intuitive content model tailored to the marketing team’s capabilities. Grounded in high-intent keyword data like “phone insurance”, the site launched in time for Mobile World Congress, delivering an immediate leap in publishing velocity.

A smartphone with a stylus placed on the screen.
A smartwatch with a pink strap displaying the time as 11 AM, heart rate at 95 bpm, and a weather indication of 12°.
Two hands holding an iPhone in a white box and another iPhone in a transparent case.

Supporting global scalability

Advanced multilingual routing and strict SEO guardrails unlocked a zero-downtime rollout across six global markets.

With the core engine proven, the project expanded into an international rollout spanning six languages. Managing deep localization on a heavily visited live site presents acute architectural risks. Without precise configuration, caching layers mistakenly serve stale content, search visibility drops due to improper indexing, and user sessions break mid-journey.

To safeguard the international experience, we bypassed generic automation, leveraging WPML for advanced multilingual routing paired with strict canonical and hreflang rules — the essential architecture ensuring search engines route global users correctly. Combined with a server-level caching strategy optimized for the high-stakes switchover, the platform deployed seamlessly with zero downtime.

A world map with various cities and their respective countries labeled.
An infographic with various circular elements containing text.

Engineering motion with purpose

Lightweight Lottie animations and proactive contrast testing turned a bold visual identity into an accessible, high-performance experience.

As the partnership matured into an extension of their team, Likewize rolled out a brand refresh centered on animated orb forms. These shapes symbolized the kinetic energy of global tech lifecycles, but translating them to the web threatened to introduce massive asset weight. Rather than adding cosmetic performance overhead, motion served as a functional framework to guide users through complex product suites.

We engineered the homepage hero and global map using lean Lottie animations. Accessibility dictated development from day one. Typography contrast ratios were verified against the moving, darker elements of the orbs throughout production, successfully holding the site to strict WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance while hitting staging ahead of schedule.

Impact

A unified global platform now accurately projects Likewize’s market leadership while granting complete operational autonomy to internal teams.

The multilingual launch executed a flawless switchover across all target markets, instantly allowing corporate marketers to publish regional content without opening a developer ticket. This foundational autonomy is backed by integrated global tracking and localized compliance infrastructure, granting the business total operational visibility without fracturing the core user experience.

We treated WordPress not as a low-code compromise, but as a high-performing enterprise medium. Rebuilding the architecture from scratch to handle multi-region content, native API integrations like Workday, and an evolving design system transformed their digital presence into a core commercial asset.

Jul 2026

One of the 214 hand-drawn sheets of Inō’s map of Japan, and his team surveying Mitarai in 1806

Measure

In 1800 a retired sake brewer named Inō Tadataka set out to walk Japan’s coast. He spent 17 years and 35,000 km on foot, and died before the work was done. His team finished the first accurate map of Japan in 1821, and it stayed in use for a century.

Jun 2026

William Badcock, A Touch-stone for Gold and Silver Wares (1677)

Hallmark

The word hallmark comes from an actual hall, Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where since 1300 silver has been tested against the sterling standard and struck with the hall’s mark, so you could trust it without knowing the maker.

May 2026

Alan Kay: His Sketches, Piano, and Computer

Notes

A note can be a written record, a struck key, or the act of noticing, and each sharpens how we understand the world. A piano is an instrument, but also a technology built on the notes it makes possible.

Apr 2026

Photographs of a red cloth bound travel handbook from 1894. The book is open to show pages with maps and illustrations.

Change

A red cloth spine caught my eye in a Tokyo bookshop last week. A handbook for travellers in Japan, fourth edition, 1894. I was 132 years late, yet most of what it describes still stands.

Mar 2026

Screenshots from the development process of the new ON release notes page

Taking the temperature

You walk into a room and you can feel it. Whether there is energy or not. We describe someone as warm. We talk about things cooling down. Temperature is something we sense before we have words for it.

Feb 2026

Pixelised image of a horse running

Rethinking video, prototyping faster, and encoding brand logic

In Japanese, the character for hand is 手. Joined with the character for craft, it becomes 手仕事 (teshigoto), or handwork.

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