// articles
Articles.
Notes on a web that won't sit still.
For years, building on WordPress meant fighting the same handful of problems on repeat. Not much worth writing down. The modern stack changed that: static builds, edge hosting, and sites that AI assistants actually read. It moves fast, and there's usually something new to explain. This is where I explain it, plainly, and only when it's worth your time.
// 23 October 2026
- · hosting
- · cloudflare
- · infrastructure
One building in London lost power. A news site in Chiswick went with it.
On 20 October, a power failure in one of Google's London data centres knocked out banking apps, couriers, the courts' video hearings and the Chiswick Calendar, a news site I look after, for about six hours. Why a WordPress site lives or dies with one building, why the sites I build now don't, and what that costs.
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// 21 October 2026
- · security
- · wordpress
- · static sites
The engine under most of the web had a hole in it
On 21 October, PHP shipped an emergency fix for two flaws that let a stranger take over a web server without logging in. What PHP2Shell was, in plain English, why updating WordPress didn't fix it, what attackers do once they're in, and why none of the sites I look after needed anything from me.
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// 9 October 2026
- · social media
- · business
- · local seo
Facebook shows the work you get. Your website shows the work you want.
A Facebook page fills up with whatever you did this week, which is usually the work that's easiest to come by. A website lets you choose what goes front and centre, the big job, the specialism, the direction you want the business to grow, and it stays there. Why a small business needs both, and how to run them together without doubling the work.
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// 4 September 2026
- · business
- · process
- · design
Why I build the website before anyone asks for it
Most of a website project isn't building the website. It's waiting for photographs, chasing an answer, and quietly talking somebody out of the version of their own business they think they can afford. So I've started building the thing first and asking afterwards.
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// 18 August 2026
- · business
- · seo
Four ways to do business email. One of them I won't set up.
Forward it to your personal inbox, use the webmail your host throws in, or pay for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Which one you need depends on things nobody explains, and one of the four causes more trouble than it solves. Plus the three DNS records that decide whether the emails you send arrive at all.
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// 11 August 2026
- · seo
- · accessibility
- · business
The half of a website nobody asks for
Clients ask how a site looks, and then how fast it loads. Nobody has ever asked me about their heading structure. But the invisible half (structured data, headings, Open Graph, alt text, a cookie banner that's actually legal) is where most websites quietly fall down, and it's precisely the half an AI website builder won't think to give you.
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// 4 August 2026
- · astro
- · javascript
- · performance
Why almost every site I build runs on Astro
People ask what I "make websites in." The answer is a framework called Astro. New, fast, and a little contrarian. Here's what it actually is, why it's the right tool for a service business's website, the kind of site it's the wrong tool for, and the one real trade-off it asks you to make.
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// 21 July 2026
- · photography
- · branding
- · business
Show your work, not someone else's
On a services or product site the photographs do more selling than the words do, and most of the sites I'm asked to fix are selling with someone else's. A note on why stock imagery and obviously-AI pictures quietly cost you trust, how I find real photographs even when a client swears they have none, and the narrow places AI genuinely earns its keep.
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// 1 July 2026
- · performance
- · static sites
- · business
Your customers are on one bar of signal. A slow website loses them.
We obsess over Lighthouse scores, but to someone standing outside your café on a patchy Dartmoor lane, or reading between Tube stations, speed is simpler than that. The page either loads before they give up, or it doesn't. What the research actually says about how many you lose, and why a static site is the fix.
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// 10 June 2026
- · ai
- · seo
- · analytics
AI reads websites now. Yours might be turning it away.
I pulled a month of server logs for one client and found AI reading their pages more than every human visitor combined, and none of it visible in analytics. What that means, how AI actually visits your site, and why some hosting quietly blocks the fastest-growing way to be found.
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// 20 May 2026
- · cloudflare
- · astro
- · cms
EmDash: Cloudflare's CMS for Astro. Not yet on client sites, but worth watching.
A short note on EmDash, the Astro-based CMS Cloudflare released in beta last month. The architecture is genuinely interesting (sandboxed plugins, capability manifests, end-to-end TypeScript) and it solves the worst of WordPress's structural problems by design. I'm not deploying it yet. I think it's the future.
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// 22 April 2026
- · wordpress
- · astro
- · security
Why I'm leading with static sites now (and what changed about WordPress)
I used to recommend WordPress to every small business that walked through the door. I don't anymore. A note on the maintenance treadmill, the cumulative cost of plugins, and the recent supply-chain attacks that made me reconsider what "easy" actually means.
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// 18 March 2026
- · privacy
- · analytics
- · performance
Google Analytics is a bit wrong. Here's how I use it anyway.
Why I run two kinds of analytics on the sites I build. Accurate, cookieless measurement for the truth, and Google Analytics for the trends and the features it's genuinely good at, gated behind real consent.
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// 18 February 2026
- · hosting
- · cloudflare
- · infrastructure
Where your website actually lives: Cloudflare's edge vs SiteGround's servers
A plain-English explanation of what "hosting" actually does, why Cloudflare's edge model is structurally different from traditional shared hosting like SiteGround, and why most of the websites that load fastest on your phone today are running on infrastructure that didn't exist when WordPress was designed.
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