Because useful WordPress tools should not make people feel powerless.
I’ve been building websites since 1998—which, in internet years, makes me approximately 417.
I did not begin with a degree, a business plan, or a carefully mapped career path. I began because I had a guild in the original Diablo and wanted to make something for it on the internet.
So I learned HTML. I opened the code, tried things, broke things, stared at them, changed something else, and eventually learned how to put them back together.
And I loved it.
Then I started building for other people.
By December 1998, I was helping local businesses get online. Since then I have built, hosted, repaired, redesigned, and managed websites for myself, friends, organizations, businesses, and creative projects.
The technology changed. The tools changed. The internet changed. Eventually WordPress became part of the story.
The part I loved never changed: I like making things work—especially things somebody else decided needed to be complicated.
Then came WordPress’s favorite sentence.
Upgrade to Pro.
You find a promising theme or plugin. You install it. You begin setting it up. Then you discover the feature that made you choose it is unavailable unless you pay, the controls are scattered across several screens, or the tool needs another tool just to do what you expected it to do in the first place.
Developers deserve to be paid for their work. This is not an argument against people earning a living. It is an argument against turning every ordinary website need into another confusing subscription, artificial limitation, or unpleasant surprise.
NAJ Themes started with a theme—but it became something broader.
I originally set out to make a WordPress theme for Nobody Asked Judy. That project grew into WhatKnots, a flexible theme designed to give different kinds of websites a strong starting point without forcing every site to look or behave the same.
Along the way, I kept finding useful features that did not really belong inside a theme. They were tools people should be able to use regardless of which theme they chose.
That changed the direction of NAJ Themes. Plugins are now the primary focus, with the occasional theme when a theme truly offers something worthwhile.
The first release is Analytics Whatnot.
Analytics Whatnot brings useful website information into WordPress in a way that is easier to understand and act upon. It includes approachable dashboards, campaign insights, performance reports, conversion tracking, and guidance that helps site owners understand what they are seeing.
WhatKnots by NAJ Themes is still in development and will be released when it is ready—not simply because a date on a calendar says it should be.
Why accessibility matters here
My own vision loss changed how I experience software. A feature can technically exist and still be difficult to find, difficult to read, or exhausting to use.
That is why NAJ Themes values larger and heavier text options, useful labels, strong contrast, understandable navigation, and interfaces that do not assume everyone sees or processes a screen the same way.
I will never claim perfection or promise that every release works for every person in every circumstance. I will promise that accessibility is part of the thinking from the beginning, not a decorative badge added at the end.
Why the mission matters more than the marketplace
NAJ Themes is being built as a mission-driven project. Its purpose is to create practical WordPress tools for people who are too often overlooked: small organizations, nonprofit volunteers, independent creators, people with limited budgets, people with disabilities, and people who simply want their website to work without becoming experts first.
I want the work to remain useful, approachable, and capable of outliving the person who started it. That means building carefully, documenting honestly, listening when something does not work, and improving the tools instead of pretending they were perfect the first time.
So… why?
Because I know what it feels like to have an idea and not have a giant budget.
Because people should not need a dictionary to manage their own websites.
Because accessibility should influence how something is built, not just how it is advertised.
Because useful software can have personality without becoming confusing.
Because after building for the web since 1998, I still believe technology should help people make things—not stand in their way.
That is why NAJ Themes exists.
Because Nobody Asked Judy.