Neil Lock developed his own WordPress plugins after the ones he used kept snagging
Tech entrepreneurNeil Lockdid not write Tranzly, Page Builder Sandwich, Zinn Chat, Zinn Cache and Zinn Translate because he needed something to explain. He wrote them because the plugins already on the Wordpress market did not function the way a working site needs them to. The founder of Zinn Digital, Zinn Hub and pbn.ltd has ADHD and autism. He says that once he can see how a tool behaves, he can see where it sticks. He thought he could build these ones better. So he did.
“Being neurodivergent is my superpower. I see life in code, not the way most people see it,” he says. He does not claim that makes someone a better developer. He does say it makes a rough edge hard to ignore. “I’ve always been obsessed with understanding how things work. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I need to pull it apart and understand what’s happening underneath.”
The edges were ordinary, and they were constant. Translation that did not really join the languages. Page builders that fought the editor, or left a mess behind the page. Chat tools that could not answer from the site they were sitting on. Caches that sped a page up and then served the old one. Lock had spent more than 25 years building software, and he had used other people’s Wordpress plugins on real sites. They worked, until they did not, and the failure was never in the brochure. It was in the join.
He treated that as a building job, not a review. Tranzly links translations of posts, pages, terms and media, one post per language, so the versions belong to each other. Zinn Translate publishes a site in 58 languages on their own addresses, with translated slugs, metadata and hreflang, because a translated page that search engines cannot find is only half finished. Page Builder Sandwich uses 48 blocks, in the block editor or its own studio, and is aimed at clean HTML, SEO and WooCommerce rather than a page that looks right and loads wrong. Zinn Chat answers from the site’s own pages, with live chat and tickets, so the widget is not a dead end. Zinn Cache is a page cache and a Redis object cache that purges when the site changes, which is the part most caches get wrong.
The plugins sit with the companies he already runs. Zinn Digital is the parent, AI-first hosting and SEO. pbn.ltd is the hosting platform he built for SEOs. Zinn Hub freelance marketplace he co-founded with his wife, Natalie, in 46 languages, with no buyer platform fee. Between them, the businesses host more than 700,000 websites. The same objection produced those. Fiverr and Upwork did not feel fair, so he built Zinn Hub. Hosting left the hard parts with the customer, so he built Zinn Digital The plugins did not run smoothly, so he built his own.
He still wants to be close to the work. “I like to be at the front of my own businesses, not hiding in the shadows while other people do the work. I would rather be the one who explains how something works, and helps people understand it.” The public account of his ADHD and autism is new. The reason for the plugins is older. He used what was there, saw where it snagged, and built the version that did not.