About Me

I’m a web developer and director of Is it meant to do that? based between the Isle of Wight and London.

I have around twenty years experience in all aspects of agency and e-commerce situations, originally starting off in music and graphic design but later swaying over to development. This allows me to understand most positions within my industry, which helps me act as a mediator between different teams, as well as sympathise with limitations and processes.

My career has given me the opportunity to work on well known brands, NGO and Government organisations and charities in a meaningful way. These days, I am a passionate web developer with a soft spot for WordPress.

In my day-to-day I work hard to ensure my code is self documenting, performative, Accessible (WCAG and the like!), secure and SEO friendly. Building on this I also try to ensure all of my work uses less power, sourced from renewables and ideally, 100% green sources.

So much so, I built a bespoke hosting platform for my business that uses up to 60% less energy while performing faster than most well known hosting platforms while presenting a tangible saving to my clients.

Outside of work I like to keep up my questionable creative skills in cooking, photography, design, music and painting.

Born on the sunny Isle of Wight, I did what pretty much every other teenager does here… Study music. It’s safe to say its a passion, but should never be a profession. We’ll leave the Platform One & IoW alumni of Wet Leg, Coach Party and Plastic Mermaids (seriously, if you haven’t heard of some of these, go and check them out!).

In 2006 I moved to London and had the chance to work with amazing brands, people and eat so, so much lovely food. While not stuffing myself silly I worked with Large retail and e-commerce outfits, healthcare, aviation, FinTech, telecoms and many other industries.

In 2019, I moved back to the Isle of Wight pretty much full-time giving me more time to enjoy the sailing, cycling and SUP on offer locally and pay attention to improving my photography.

I share my name with a deceased soul singer. Back in the day when Twitter wasn’t a cess pit and I wrote web design and development articles, my SEO was affected by the former James Blackwood.

cleatsandcode I think captured the sailing/cycling and code aspects of things. Then came my penchant for street photography, so that’s cleatsandclicks covered.

Then we have @scrappylittleshit. Well, that’s just Ronseal for the print/art design side of things.

At no point, did I imply or guarantee an interesting story. No refunds or store credit.