Hi, I'm James.

From Hull to a Devon desk

I left the University of Hull in 2018 with a First in Computer Science, and spent the next year on small websites, a few passion projects, and helping out on the family farm.

In 2019 things stepped up a gear. Bridget Osborne, a BBC journalist of thirty years, invited me up to London to work on the Chiswick Calendar, the daily West London news site she founded with her son Nick. I joined the development side alongside Dawn Wilson of DW Multimedia, who was rebuilding the site with a complete redesign and rebrand. I started out helping and learning from Dawn, and grew into the partnership I'm still part of today.

While I was in London I was lucky enough to meet many of the clients I still work with today. One introduction led to Culted, the Gen-Z fashion brand I later rebuilt with them from the ground up. Another was Peter Oborne, the journalist and author, whose political-accountability project political-lies.co.uk I helped build. When lockdown wiped out live cricket, Peter and the writer Richard Heller wanted a remote podcast to fill the gap: Oborne & Heller on Cricket. I ran the technical side from the first episode to the last (118 of them, 2020 to 2023), with guests you couldn't get in a normal studio, from Sir Geoffrey Boycott to Kobus Olivier, CEO of the Ukraine Cricket Federation, who joined us during the war in Ukraine.

I was in London through the lockdowns. Staying would probably have been the easier financial call, since the work was there, but I was born and raised in Devon, so when I could move back, I did. The nature of what I do means I can work from anywhere, and I don't take that for granted: I look after my London and overseas clients just as closely from a rural desk as I would from a city one.

Alongside the London names, I've built or run sites for a Dartmoor farmers' association, a commoners' association managing 1,671 hectares of moorland, a sheep-breeders' association founded in 1909, a therapist, and a dog field on the edge of Dartmoor. The range is on purpose: it stops me being a one-trick developer.

How I work

I'm the only point of contact on every project, from the first chat to launch and beyond. South Devon is my specialty and my home patch, but the client list runs from Ivybridge to London to overseas. The work happens over video calls and email, and it works exactly the same ten minutes away as it does five thousand miles away. I do the design and copy myself, which keeps the whole site coherent; when a project needs professional photography or video I bring in a trusted photographer or videographer and fold it into the work. Either way, the client always deals with one person.

For ongoing support after launch there are no minimum commitments and no retainer fees. Clients get in touch when they need something, and I'm there; when they don't, the site just keeps running. Most of my long-term relationships started that way: one small fix, then another, then a redesign, then a custom plugin.

What I won't pretend to be

I'm not an agency. I'm not a "team of senior engineers" hidden behind a single front-of-house. I'm one person with 8 years of real-world freelance under my belt, and that's the offer. It's also exactly why I can look after smaller businesses properly. An agency carries a team, an office and account management, and the quote starts around £10,000 before anyone has built anything. I carry none of that, so the same build costs less; the difference is overhead, not hours. I'm also far quicker to react, without cutting a corner on quality.

That doesn't make me the right answer for everyone, and I won't pretend otherwise. Agencies earn their fees, and for some projects they're the better call. I've told clients exactly that, I've worked alongside agencies, and I'm happy to point you towards one when it's what you actually need. I also take on subcontract work for them myself (a London comms agency might bring me in to build for one of their clients), where they keep the relationship and I handle the development. The first chat is where we work out who you should be working with: sometimes that's me, sometimes it isn't.