About
I'm based in Bournemouth and I work with businesses and digital agencies right across the UK, building websites, web apps and digital products mostly in WordPress, Laravel and Statamic. Some of the sites I built when I was first starting out are still running today, and that's something that genuinely matters to me.
I'm a freelance developer, technologist and digital lead, and the work I do is really about helping businesses and agencies build the websites, web apps and digital products they need to move faster, work more smoothly and get better results from the time they're putting in.
In practice, that tends to break down into two kinds of work. I work directly with businesses (in-house marketing teams, founders, operations leads) on builds where they really just need a developer they can trust rather than a full agency engagement. And I work with digital agencies as white-label support, sitting inside your repo, joining your standups, working through your sprints alongside the rest of your team.
Where I tend to land
The projects that come my way usually look like one of a handful of things. Often it's a marketing site that has outgrown the templated theme it started life on. Sometimes it's a back-office tool where the spreadsheet has finally got too big to manage, or an inherited build that's quietly holding the rest of the business back. And sometimes it's a busy agency that needs another developer to slot into the team for a sprint, or for a whole season of work.
Whichever shape the work takes, the way I run things stays the same. You'll get regular written updates so you always know where we are, conversations without jargon, and a developer who'll tell you honestly when something looks like a bad idea before it becomes an expensive one.
I’m proud to have been working with businesses and agencies for over a decade. Throughout that time, the way we build and use websites and web apps has fundamentally changed, but the underlying principles of how to best work together to get to a great result are exactly the same.
Below is a small selection of the projects I’m proud to have worked with clients to bring to life over the past years, many of which I still work on today.
Contractor permits platform
A Laravel application built to replace a paper-and-inbox permit process across Utilita’s contractor estate. Generates PDFs from the team’s existing templates, handles e-signatures, gives everyone a proper audit trail end to end.
Facilities management platform
A Laravel and Filament platform we built together to replace the compliance spreadsheets the team had outgrown. Real-time RAG status, contractor task-logging, automatic compliance scoring, and an ongoing partnership as the platform grows.
Website launch support
Brought in independently by the lead agency to help drive content migration, page building and coordination across everyone involved, all the way through to launch day.
Custom WordPress theme
A custom WordPress theme built from a design agency’s files, with a custom-post-type catalogue for the plant-hire machinery the GT Lifting team look after and update themselves day to day.
Long-running agency partnerships
A long-running partnership with a couple of London and South Coast agencies on builds for SSE, GT Lifting and a number of Audi-network supplier sites. White-label work, sprint by sprint, alongside the agencies’ own teams.
Freelance practice
I started out freelance in 2010 and have been doing the work ever since. The earliest of those builds are still running today, and honestly that’s the only measure of this job I really trust.
001 / Updates
Every week you'll get a short written update from me, covering what's shipped, what's coming next, and anything that needs a decision from your side. Nothing you have to translate for the rest of your team, and nothing important hiding at the bottom of a Slack thread.
002 / Judgement
When you bring me onto a project, you're paying for my judgement as much as my code. If a brief has a gap in it, or a stack choice that'll quietly hurt the project in a year or two, you'll hear that from me in plain English well before it becomes expensive to fix.
003 / Longevity
Sensible architecture, no clever-for-clever's-sake patterns, and codebases the next developer can pick up without needing to go on an archaeological dig to understand what's going on. The work has to outlive the engagement, and that shapes everything I write.
Three core stacks
Most of the work I take on lives in one of three places: WordPress, Laravel or Statamic. They're the stacks I know best, and the ones I think give clients the most room to grow into.
Around those sit a handful of things I bring to nearly every project I work on, like project management, technical leadership, retained advisory time and technical due diligence on inherited builds. They aren't packages with prices on them, just the shape of how I tend to work with clients in practice.
I'm based in Bournemouth on the south coast, where I run mostly on coffee, walk a lot when I'm trying to think a tricky build through, and pick up a camera at weekends when I get the chance. Family, sea air and the occasional really decent flat white pretty much covers the rest of it.
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