Deep roots.
Fresh code.
Thirty years of building, running, and monetizing websites — from national news publishers serving millions of pageviews a day to an author's first site. Lately, that also means nine free WordPress plugins and AI tools that draft, search, and audit for working newsrooms.
Everything a website needs to thrive
From first sketch to millions of pageviews — one studio, senior hands, direct answers.
Sites built & rebuilt
New builds, redesigns, and revamps on custom WordPress themes — fast, responsive, and easy for your own team to run.
Custom plugins & features
When off-the-shelf won't do: plugins, integrations, shortcodes, and admin tools built to WordPress standards and maintained for years, not abandoned after launch.
Migrations, hosting & DNS
Host-to-host moves without lost traffic or downtime — hosting, DNS, and email sorted along the way, for one site or a whole network.
Performance at news scale
Speed, caching, and CDN work for sites that have to stay up on their biggest day — habits formed on publications serving millions of pageviews a day.
Monetization that behaves
Responsive ad placement, ad-network and affiliate setups, and newsletters that land — Mailchimp, Klaviyo, PostUp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and friends — so revenue grows without wrecking the read.
Online stores
WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento storefronts with the whole chain wired: Authorize.net, PayPal, Square, ShipStation, and the emails that follow the order.
SEO, analytics & Google News
Clean structured data, GA4 that tells the truth, sitemaps and news SEO. We build our own SEO and analytics plugins, so this runs deep.
AI, put to work
Custom tools on Claude and OpenAI: a wire desk that drafts in each author's voice, a search engine that answers from a publication's entire archive, an editorial typo scanner. AI that saves editor-hours instead of making noise.
Care & feeding
Ongoing maintenance, security cleanups, and emergency fixes from a developer who answers — including at the worst possible time, which is when sites prefer to break.
AI that earns its keep in a newsroom
Our own tools, running in production for real publishers — built on Claude and OpenAI, and tuned to how editors actually work.
Drafts in the author's voice
A wire desk that watches trusted sources, clusters the day's stories, and — only after an editor approves a headline — drafts the article in that writer's own voice, trained on their published work.
Answers from the whole archive
Conversational deep-dive search over a publication's entire back catalog: researched answers, citations to the original stories, and an honest "the reporting doesn't cover that" when it doesn't.
Gives an AI assistant eyes on the server
A read-only layer that shows Claude in Chrome what a WordPress install is actually doing — theme code, plugin settings, vulnerabilities — so it can diagnose a whole site. Released free as Understory Trace.
Built so editors stay in charge: the tools draft, answer, and diagnose — people decide.
Trusted with sites readers depend on
Publications, organizations, and authors whose sites Orchard Grove Media has designed, built, or run — a few highlights, with the longer list below.
Clients over the years — the longer list
Straightforward, start to finish
No account managers, no discovery-phase theater — a senior developer and a plan.
Tell us where it hurts
A redesign, a migration, a slow site, a feature nobody else will touch. Email what you're facing — you'll hear back from Ted, not a queue.
Get a plan in plain English
Scope, timeline, and a straight price. You'll know what's being built, what it costs, and when it lands.
We build. You review. It ships.
Short build cycles you can click through, honest progress updates, and a launch that sticks — with us still reachable long after.
Nine free plugins, grown in‑house
Built for the sites we run first, then released free and open source. Each one has a home of its own:
Cross-Site Importer
Publish once, syndicate everywhere: posts flow between your WordPress sites with images localized, canonicals handled, and source edits that sync.
crosssiteimporter.com →GP Dark Mode
No-flash dark mode for GeneratePress — the mode is set before first paint, with a dark palette grown from your own Global Colors. Our gift to the GeneratePress community.
gpdarkmode.com →Heirloom SEO
All the SEO, none of the bloat — meta, schema, sitemaps, IndexNow, llms.txt — and zero CSS or JavaScript added to your pages.
heirloomseo.com →OG Watermark
Watermarks baked into the pixels of every image size, with a hash-verified pristine backup for one-click undo.
ogwatermark.com →OpenPoll
A one-question poll pinned to any post: readers answer with their email address, AI writes the question, and an anti-spam stack keeps the list clean.
openpoll.dev →Precision Analytics
GA4 wired in the right way — custom dimensions, Consent Mode v2, sampling you control — and reports pulled back into WordPress.
precisionanalytics.dev →Understory Trace
Server-side sight for Claude in Chrome: a read-only audit layer exposing theme code, plugin settings, and vulnerabilities as clean JSON.
understorytrace.com →WP AuthorPay
Pageviews in, payout statements out: GA4 traffic attributed to each writer, pay computed to the cent, branded PDF, Excel, and CSV statements.
wpauthorpay.com →WP AutoTag
Tags doing actual work: builds a vocabulary from the posts you have, tags new ones as they publish, and links tag names to their archives.
wpautotag.dev →Why clients stay for decades
Plenty of shops can build a website. Fewer are still there — and still good — twenty years later.
Grown by referral
For thirty years, most new projects have arrived the same way: a client telling someone else. Attentiveness and quality are the whole marketing plan.
Hardened at news scale
Millions of pageviews a day, breaking-news spikes, ad-heavy pages, layered caches — our habits were formed where downtime costs real money.
An editor's eye
Ted edited a national online magazine before running a network of 60+ news sites. He reads like an editor and builds like an engineer.
One accountable human
You work directly with a senior developer from first email to launch and beyond. No handoffs, no offshore team, no mystery.
Ted Slater has been building the web since 1994
He was hand-coding pages for the Christian Broadcasting Network when the web was young, spent five years as editor of a national online magazine at Focus on the Family, then seven as CTO of a network of 60+ news sites and stores — the years that taught him what "high traffic" really means.
Today he runs Orchard Grove Media, LLC from Arizona: client work, nine free WordPress plugins, and AI products for publishers. He holds master's degrees in Intercultural Communication and Education, and bachelor's degrees in English/Journalism and Spanish — so he'll fix your database and your grammar.
Ted's full history — thirty years of it, with references — lives at tedslater.com.
Let's put thirty years to work on your site.
A revamp or full redesign, a migration, a stubborn performance problem, or a brand-new build — tell us what you're facing, and you'll hear back from Ted himself.
ted@orchardgrove.com · Orchard Grove Media, LLC · Arizona, USA