Classic WordPress Digital Product Design

I want a full WordPress build for my digital-product brand, centred around a custom-designed theme that feels classic and elegant rather than overly modern. The site’s core purpose is to present and sell downloadable products, so all design choices should guide visitors smoothly from discovery to purchase while reflecting a refined, timeless aesthetic.

The project calls for:
• A bespoke theme (no pre-builts or child themes) coded to WordPress best practices and ready for future updates.
• Page templates for home, product catalogue, single product, checkout/thank-you, blog and a simple contact page.
• Responsive layouts that preserve the elegant look across desktop, tablet and mobile.
• Clean typography, balanced white space and a muted colour palette that supports high-quality imagery.
• Seamless integration with WooCommerce (or another lightweight digital-sales plugin if you have a better suggestion) plus PayPal and Stripe.
• Performance optimisation so pages load quickly even with multiple product images.
• Final hand-off that includes the theme files, any custom plug-ins, and instructions for installation and basic content editing.

Acceptance criteria:
1. Pages pass Google Lighthouse with 90+ performance on mobile.
2. Theme follows WordPress coding standards and installs without errors on a fresh WP instance.
3. All core templates display correctly on the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

If this scope fits your skill set, tell me how you’d approach the design phase and what timeline you foresee for first mock-ups through to live launch.