Curated by Hower

Overview

Curated by Hower is an editorial home decor blog built for affiliate marketing. The site runs on a fully custom WordPress theme powered by Advanced Custom Fields blocks, and over time it became much more than a publishing platform. The real work was building a suite of tools around it to help a non-technical editor publish at scale, maintain strong SEO, and grow organic traffic without needing a developer involved in day-to-day operations.

The Challenge

The client is not technical, and affiliate blogging demands a high volume of well-optimized content to gain traction in search. That tension between content velocity and quality is hard to solve with off-the-shelf WordPress tooling. Images needed to be consistently optimized without the client thinking about it, content needed to be structured for SEO without manual overhead, and the site needed to stay fast and healthy as the content library grew.

Approach

The foundation is a custom theme built from scratch with ACF flexible content blocks, giving the client full control over layouts without touching code. ESbuild handles asset compilation, keeping the build lean and the output minimal.

From there, I built a series of custom tools directly into the WordPress admin to solve real workflow problems as they surfaced.

For images, I built a copy-paste upload workflow where the client can paste an image directly and the system handles uploading, resizing, optimization, and conversion automatically. No plugins to configure, no steps to remember.

For content, I built an AI-powered publishing tool that generates pillar and cluster posts on a given topic, with internal linking handled automatically between related posts. This let the client build out topical authority in a fraction of the time it would take manually.

I also built a bulk SEO editor for reviewing and updating meta titles, descriptions, and other SEO fields across posts without opening each one individually, and an AI bulk image alt tag generator that processes the media library and writes descriptive alt text at scale.

For distribution, I integrated the Pinterest API directly into the post editing experience. The client can create a pin from any post with a single action, and AI generates a suggested pin description based on the post content.

Performance and search visibility have been monitored closely throughout via Google Search Console and Analytics, with ongoing adjustments to markup, structured data, page speed, and internal linking based on what the data shows.

Outcome

The result is a platform that gives a non-technical editor the tooling to publish, optimize, and distribute content at a pace that would otherwise require a dedicated team. The AI tools in particular changed what was possible, turning tasks that used to take hours into actions that take seconds.