Karl Swinkels
Web designer and developer. WordPress and Elementor Pro specialist. 15 years of experience, based in New Zealand.
2008 - 2012 · Unitec, Auckland
Bachelor of Product Design. Four years learning how to identify opportunities or problems and coming up with solutions to solve them through product conceptualisation, development and refinement. Then creating the marketing material (both digital and print) to reach the target users. Extra papers included: ergonomics, photography, CAD work and sustainable design practice.
Campus signwriter: solely in charge of production, installation and maintenance of signage across the Carrington and Henderson campuses.
2012 · Certifications
Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) accreditation: Certified Internet Webmaster – Design; Certified Internet Webmaster – Security. Diplomas in content marketing, digital marketing and social media (2016).
2012 - 2021 · Pixels and Paper
Nine years self-employed as a general marketer and web designer. Spotted consumer, digital and web trends early and then implemented and managed them for clients with a focus on growth. Clients from lean startups and mum and dad businesses in New Zealand scaling right up through to larger agency work and corporates.
2021 - present · Site Shepherds
The agency era, predominantly building websites with WordPress and Elementor, e-commerce builds being shipped with WooCommerce. Monthly care plans and honest advice, keeping New Zealand businesses thriving safely online. Subcontracted to agencies including some in America as well.
2021 - present · Products
While running Site Shepherds I have started building the following standalone projects. Each runs as its own brand.
Meal Mate is a meal planning web app that turns a week of recipes into a costed shopping list, pricing every ingredient against live New Zealand supermarket data so users can see what dinner actually costs before they shop. Built solo end to end in Next.js 14, TypeScript and Supabase, including the price scraping pipeline, drag-and-drop meal planner and Stripe-based subscription tier.
BeautyBook is a standalone WordPress booking plugin for the beauty industry, built as a subscription SaaS product to compete with Fresha. It combines a PHP 8 / custom-table backend with Vue 3 front-end and admin SPAs, covering multi-service bookings, staff scheduling, payments, notifications and white-label licensing.
ForgeStudio is a native Windows 11 desktop application (C#/.NET 8, WPF/MVVM, SQLite) that replaces a dozen separate tools for YouTube creators: ideation, scripting, SEO, thumbnail design, competitor tracking, analytics and bulk channel operations. Shipped across four versioned phases with clean layered architecture (domain/data/UI separation), OAuth 2.0 PKCE integration to the YouTube Data and Analytics APIs, pluggable AI providers, and local-first data storage with encrypted secrets: no accounts, no telemetry.