You talk to the person building it
Every conversation, from the first email to the last deploy, is with the engineer doing the work. Nothing gets lost being relayed, and nothing waits three days for a reply.
The studio
Horizontal Impact is one engineer, and that's the point.
No account manager, no ticket queue, no handoff to someone you've never met. The person who scopes your project is the person who writes the code and pushes the deploy.
Alejandro PerezFounder & principal engineer · Quad Cities, IL & IA
Ten years of other people's platforms.
Six of those years were spent building hundreds of dealership sites under manufacturer brand rules that leave no room for interpretation. Four have been spent on enterprise WordPress VIP, replatforming publications with tens of thousands of posts without losing their search rankings.
Both taught the same lesson: the constraint is never the interesting part of the work, but ignoring it is what kills projects. Horizontal Impact exists to do that kind of engineering for businesses that can't hire a team to do it.
Accessibility is engineered in, not bolted on
Every build ships WCAG 2.2 AA, audited with AccessKnight before launch — the same tool sold to other studios. It's a gate in the process, not a line item on the invoice.
Honest scoping, even when it costs us
Sometimes the answer is a five-page site rather than a platform. Sometimes it's a template you set up yourself. You'll get told which, including when the honest answer means a smaller invoice.
You own everything when we're done
Source code, hosting, domains, analytics, documentation. No proprietary CMS, no licence to keep paying, no hostage retainer. If we part ways, you lose nothing.
What actually happens after you say yes.
Six steps, the same on every project, from the first call to the day everything transfers into your accounts. None of it is a surprise and none of it is an upsell.
The call
Free · 30 minutesPrices are already published, so this isn't a call to work out whether you can afford us. It's half an hour to describe the problem and get an honest answer about whether a website is what actually fixes it.
The scope
Before any codeA written scope: fixed price, named deliverables, dates held on the calendar. You approve it before anything starts, and half up front books the schedule. If the work changes later we agree it in writing, and the number moves with it.
The direction
In the browserOne design direction, built as a working page rather than a picture of one. You review the real type, the real spacing and the real behaviour on your own phone. Revision rounds are included — how many is set in your scope, not negotiated later.
The build
Staging from day oneEngineering happens against a staging URL you can open whenever you want, so nothing is held back for a reveal. Questions get an answer inside one work day, from the person writing the code.
The audit
Before launchEvery build goes through AccessKnight for WCAG 2.2 AA, and Core Web Vitals get measured on real hardware rather than a lab score. What we find is fixed before launch instead of logged for later. You get the report either way.
The handover
Launch dayRepository, hosting, domain, analytics and written documentation all move into your accounts. Thirty days of fixes cover anything we got wrong. Nothing about the site requires you to keep working with us.
Where the experience comes from
2019 — Present
Founder & principal engineer
The studio, its six commercial products, and the accessibility practice — designed, engineered and shipped in-house.
- Built AccessKnight solo: automated WCAG 2.2 AA and AI-readability auditing, now sold to other studios and the engine behind this studio's accessibility work.
- Replaced a third-party storefront with native commerce — Stripe Checkout, Supabase entitlements, Resend fulfilment.
- Runs horizontalimpact.com on headless WordPress and Next.js 14: WPGraphQL, ISR revalidation, Vercel.
Horizontal Impact LLC · Quad Cities, IL
2022 — Present
Web engineer
Hands-on engineer for a multi-brand publishing portfolio — nine production sites on WordPress VIP, reporting to the CTO.
- Sole-authored the WordPress build for a Sitecore → WordPress VIP replatform: a custom block theme and content-model plugin carrying 16 custom post types and 17 dynamic blocks.
- Preserved legacy SEO through the migration — ~17,700 catalog URLs replicated and 3,267 redirect mappings established from production-database analysis.
- Shipped a redesign pilot on a ~39,000-post, 8-brand platform via a zero-risk staging pattern, clearing 42 accessibility and responsive findings before handoff.
- Hardened a 7-site fleet with self-authored mu-plugins, and built reversible WP-CLI repair tooling that corrected 850+ production records in one audited pass.
Firecrown · Chattanooga, TN (remote)
2016 — 2022
Senior front-end developer
High-volume WordPress delivery for automotive retail, on a proprietary dealership platform.
- Built and customized hundreds of custom WordPress dealership sites — the same class of local business, with the same lead-generation problem, this studio serves today.
- Met OEM brand compliance on every build, working inside manufacturer design and content standards that leave no room for interpretation.
- Owned responsive, standards-based front-end across HTML, Sass, JavaScript and PHP, with usability testing and cross-platform verification before handoff.
- Ran code review for security, structure and standards compliance, and mentored junior developers to the same bar.
Dealer Inspire · Naperville, IL
Six products, sold to the industry.
Each one started as something this studio needed on a real engagement. They're here as evidence the work ships, not as the reason to hire us.
AccessKnight
WCAG 2.2 AA and AI-readability auditing. The scanner behind this studio's accessibility practice.
Obsidian UI
Dark-first React components, tree-shakeable, sixteen of them.
LaunchKit
The parts of a SaaS you rebuild every time, already wired together.
Polish
A system prompt that turns generic AI output into UI worth shipping.
GEO Audit Kit
Everything needed to sell an AI-visibility audit to a client this week.
Client OS
Six connected systems that let one person deliver like a larger studio.
Based in the Quad Cities. Useful anywhere.
The studio is in Illinois, on the Iowa border, and most clients are within a few hours of it. That matters for the local search work, where knowing the area is part of the job.
Everything else is remote by default and has been for years — the enterprise work happens for a company in Tennessee. If your project doesn't need someone in the room, distance has never been the constraint.