Ethical — Ethical Alternatives for Tech
A WordPress magazine and directory for people who want to quit Big Tech without losing their mind.
The Client
Ethical.net is a content platform and directory for people looking to replace mainstream tech products with privacy-respecting, sustainable, and ethically-produced alternatives. The site's mission is 'ethical alternatives for tech stuff' — helping visitors move in the direction of least possible harm against people, animals, and the planet. It publishes guides on alternatives to Facebook, Amazon, and other mainstream platforms, maintains a curated alternatives directory, and hosts a community forum.
The Brief
Ethical.net's content spans three distinct modes — editorial magazine, curated product directory, and community forum — and needed a design that unified these without making any section feel like an afterthought or a bolted-on module.
What Shipped
Built a custom WordPress theme that treats the magazine, directory, and forum as first-class content types sharing a coherent visual language. Custom post types and taxonomies organise the directory listings; custom templates serve each content mode; and a shared design token layer keeps typography and colour consistent across all three.
How it was built
Fully custom theme with no page builder, using PHP template hierarchy to serve distinct layouts for magazine posts, directory entries, and forum pages. Custom post types handle directory listings with structured meta fields; WordPress's native taxonomy system powers filtering by category, region, and ethical certification.
Designing a single visual system that works for long-form editorial content, dense directory listings, and user-generated forum posts — three formats with very different density and interactivity requirements — without the design feeling inconsistent across modes.
Results & reach
The unified theme supports ethical.net's mission of making ethical tech choices accessible, presenting a magazine-quality experience that holds its own against major tech publications while covering a niche the mainstream press overlooks.