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 who founded the Chiswick Calendar, a daily West London news site, with her son Nick — invited me up to London to work on it. 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 — 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 the 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 therapy practice, 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 am the only point of contact for every project, from initial conversation through to launch and after. South Devon is my specialty and my home patch, but the client list runs from Ivybridge to London to overseas — most work is remote, and I am equally happy on a video call or meeting in person if you are local. Design and copy I keep in-house and do 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 simply runs. Most of my long-term relationships started that way — one small fix, then another, then a redesign, then a custom plugin.

What I will not pretend to be

I am not an agency. I am not a "team of senior engineers" hidden behind a single front-of-house. I am one person with 8 years of real-world freelance under their belt, and that is genuinely the offer. It is also exactly why I can look after smaller businesses properly: an agency build often starts around £10,000 because there's a whole team to pay for, whereas I can be far more flexible on price and far quicker to react — without cutting a corner on quality.

That does not make me the right answer for everyone, and I won't pretend otherwise. Agencies earn their fees, and for some projects they genuinely are the better call — I've told clients exactly that, I've worked alongside agencies, and I'm happy to point you toward 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 discovery call is where we work out, honestly, who you should be working with: sometimes that's me, sometimes it isn't.