YOMM | Tim Hurley

What

News, competitions, reviews and rewards for sharing your opinions on a range of products and services.
YOMM is all about connecting, supporting and harnessing the influence of millions of young Australians.

Why

To create a clean, minimal site where imagery could lead, while keeping pages fast for mobile-heavy engagement across a wide range of devices.

Who

WOM Network

A product-led tech company behind shopper advocacy communities including YOMM, ReviewByYOU, Making Home and MoMs. I worked in a startup-style environment, owning architecture, platform delivery and product engineering across a lean team.

How

Design

The design needed to stay clean and simple, meet the brand goals, appeal to 13–21 year olds with varied tastes, and still provide a strong UX across the site.

Development

To ensure page weight and load times remained as low as possible a custom theme was developed from scratch, ensuring no unneeded code was included. Although using WordPress as our foundation, much of the site uses highly customised, performant code and scalable architecture behind the scenes.

YOMM launched the custom WordPress Multisite platform I led for the WOM network, built to WP VIP coding standards across core, plugins, mu-plugins and themes. Each new site extended the same shared foundation, building towards everything needed to replace the network's slow, inefficient legacy site — without a single, risky rewrite.

Hosting

Speed was a key area for this website. Using an array of server-side tactics to improve page generation times, combined with additional layers of caching – at a server level and through Cloudflare's geographically dispersed CDN – I was able to ensure YOMM would be both reliable and fast, across public and user specific pages.

The self-managed stack also used serverless functions where they made more sense than pushing everything through to the origin server.

Imagery + Icons

To help lower page weight and provide crisp imagery across all screen types, SVG logos and icons were created wherever possible, for use across the site.
To ensure content remained the focus, photographs needed to be crisp - automatically selecting not just the clearest, but the appropriately sized image; optimising page loads.

Integrations

Integrated Stripe into a separate sub-site used for company self-service interactions with the platform and partner sites. That area was access-restricted rather than fully public, keeping payment flows available where needed without adding weight to the main public experience.

Across the wider WOM network, I replaced paid link-shortening services with serverless functions and KV storage — removing recurring costs while keeping redirects near-instant through edge caching — and built custom Slack commands so non-technical staff could trigger deploys, clear CDN caches and manage short links themselves.

Leadership

As technical and project lead, I made the core architecture decisions, handled key development work, delegated and reviewed tasks across a distributed team, led hiring and onboarding, and kept stakeholders updated as requirements evolved.