Work

Selected clients I’ve built for or maintained over the years. Some go back almost two decades; others were two-week emergency rescues. Most started on WordPress. Several, including this site, are heading toward Astro now.

Two flags worth knowing about. recoveryArea has been my own consultancy since 2003 — website builds, maintenance, migrations, the occasional rescue. Mintminds is the experimentation partnership I co-founded in 2016 — A/B testing, personalisation, the home-built GrowthBook Toolbox you’ll find me writing about elsewhere. Most clients below are tagged with the relevant flag — internally we made the same shift, from ra_framework (recoveryArea) to the (Mintminds) GrowthBook Toolbox.

Currently working with

QLF (Quality Lighting Fashion)

2014 – present · twelve years of CRO · Mintminds

Twelve years of conversion-optimisation development for QLF Holding’s e-commerce portfolio — lampenlicht.nl (the Dutch flagship), lampenundleuchten.de, lampandlight.co.uk and the rest of QLF’s 15+ European domains. 500+ A/B tests across varying complexity levels, built on custom testing frameworks that integrate with the existing marketing stack. Two awards along the way: the 2019 DDMA Dutch CRO Award (Mobile category) and the 2020 Dutch Search Award (best CRO campaign). Today the bulk of QLF’s experimentation runs through the in-house GrowthBook Toolbox: 6 live experiments, 7 personalisations, with around 140 more archived in the current Toolbox alone.

Toom

Ongoing · React SPA experimentation · Mintminds

Large German DIY retailer. Migrated their A/B testing off Optimizely onto the home-built GrowthBook Toolbox. The technical centre of gravity is wrangling React re-renders against their market/locale system — getting variants to fire reliably without losing them to internal state churn. Around 200 experiments shipped to date across the Optimizely and GrowthBook eras combined.

Leaseabike (LAB)

Ongoing · React hydration timing · Mintminds

German company-bike-leasing brand (lease-a-bike.de). Remix SSR + Tailwind + Emotion stack. The interesting technical piece is a hydration-aware trigger built into the Toolbox to handle Remix cleanly — watches React Fiber internals + DOM stability + browser idle to fire experiments at the right moment, not before the framework is ready.

The Social Hub (TSH)

Ongoing · Convert → GrowthBook migration · Mintminds

International student-housing brand. Migrated experimentation off Convert into the in-house GrowthBook Toolbox. React 16 SPA, in-app booking widget, multi-template baseline; previous Convert work archived but accessible if needed for historical comparisons.

Plate

Ongoing · Mintminds

German e-retailer (plate.de) running experimentation through the Mintminds GrowthBook Toolbox.

Live Football Tickets

Ongoing · Convert · Mintminds

Football-tickets resale platform. Long-running experimentation work on Convert via the ra_framework. Currently evaluating a move to GrowthBook, which would bring the work into the (Mintminds) Toolbox alongside the other tenants.

Riverlane

2024 – present · WordPress architecture, Astro migration · recoveryArea

Modern WordPress on Studiopress Genesis with a custom optimisation layer (WP Rocket + Cloudflare edge). Core Web Vitals consistently in the 95+ percentile while maintaining full accessibility and content-management flexibility. Currently mid-migration to Astro 6 — bilingual NL/EN, 24 pages, complete content port from a WPML SQL backup including 16 NL + 16 EN team members and 55 NL + 52 EN publications with bilingual auto-tagging.

Rokade

Long-term partnership · WordPress + local SEO · recoveryArea

Same performance-first stack as Riverlane (Genesis + WP Rocket + Cloudflare edge). Beyond the build: set up their Google Business listing back when it was still called that, and Rokade quickly became the most rated business in their field on Google Maps.

recoveryArea

2003 – present · home base

The consultancy itself. Currently mid-migration from WordPress to Astro — meta in the best way; the new site is built on the same stack I’d recommend to any of these clients today.

Past clients

Euroring

2007 – 2024 · long-running WordPress build · recoveryArea

First site went live in 2007 — together with a fellow developer I built their initial Joomla! build. We migrated to WordPress in 2012 (designed by a third party); that build was refreshed by an external agency around 2020 and is still up and running. In 2021 we completed a full redesign — sadly, it never made it past staging at staging.euroring.com. Day-to-day management has been with another party since 2024. Still close with the owner.

Fragma.av

Two-week emergency · migration & security hardening · recoveryArea

Critical timeline to modernise a legacy WordPress installation and migrate to a secure hosting environment. Rebuilt the entire WooCommerce implementation from scratch, deployed SSL throughout, and fronted the new stack with a Cloudflare security layer. Vulnerable legacy → modern secure architecture, in two weeks.

Apex Jiu Jitsu

Client website · WordPress · recoveryArea

Built and maintained the apexjiujitsu.nl WordPress site.