Platform

What I've been building — and what it means for you

Jamie · 5 August 2026 · 8 min read

I don't post much about my own work — I'd rather be doing it. But enough has changed in the last while that an update is overdue, and some of it is directly useful to people I already work with. Here's where things are up to, plainly.

The platform

The bulk of my time has gone into building tools I originally needed myself, running client sites, and then found other people needed too.

Insights — reporting that pulls Google Analytics, Search Console and Ads into one plain-English report, scheduled and sent automatically. Built because writing monthly client reports by hand is a tax on everybody.
Monitoring — uptime, SSL and DNS watched around the clock, with alerts that arrive before a customer rings you. Built after one too many Sunday phone calls.
The launchpad — one account for all of it, so you're not juggling five logins and five invoices.
The free website audit — on the site right now, no sign-up, about fifteen seconds. It's the same first-pass check I'd run before quoting on anything.

None of this is theoretical. It runs the sites in the portfolio before it runs anyone else's.

Client work that's taught me the most

Alongside the platform, the day job continues — and the projects that pushed me hardest recently have been ecommerce.

Moving stores from WooCommerce to Shopify, building custom themes that live in version control with automated checks before anything ships, restructuring product data so a page answers the question that actually stops the sale, and refreshing hundreds of product descriptions at a scale that simply wasn't affordable by hand a couple of years ago. I wrote that one up properly in Shopify themes built like software.

Several of these were built alongside Gasoline Media, which I enjoy — good agencies are good to work with, and I'll come back to that below.

Keeping current, deliberately

The uncomfortable truth about this trade is that it does not hold still. What I knew cold five years ago is now partly obsolete, and the only defence is to keep deliberately learning rather than coasting on experience.

Where that's gone lately:

Modern build practices. Everything in version control, changes reviewed on a preview URL, automated checks before release. Ordinary in software, still rare in small-business web work, and the single biggest reason my updates are cheaper and safer than they used to be.
AI, used properly. Not as a novelty — as a working tool for drafting, restructuring content at volume, first-pass research and the tedious parts of code. With a person reviewing every line that reaches a customer.
Automation. Reporting that sends itself, monitoring that escalates on its own, billing and onboarding that don't need me to remember them. Most small businesses have three or four of these quietly eating a day a month.
Accessibility and performance as build decisions rather than an audit you fail later.
And formally: training. I've just completed my Certificate III and IV in Training and Assessment, so I can teach this properly rather than by instinct — more on that here.

An honest question about your current agency

I want to be fair here, because I collaborate with agencies and some of them are excellent. But it's worth asking a straight question about whoever currently looks after your website.

When did they last bring you an idea you hadn't asked for?

Not an invoice. Not a renewal notice. An actual suggestion: something new that could save you time, a change worth making because the way people search has shifted, a warning that a thing you rely on is going end-of-life. If you're paying a monthly retainer and the relationship is entirely you asking and them quoting, you're paying for availability, not expertise.

The last few years have moved quickly. AI has changed what's affordable — jobs that used to be quoted at thousands are now an afternoon. Search has changed what gets found. Core Web Vitals, accessibility obligations, the end of third-party cookies, the shift in how people actually arrive at a local business — all of it has real consequences for a small business website, and none of it announces itself.

A good partner is reading that on your behalf and translating it into "here's what I'd change, and here's what I wouldn't bother with". If yours isn't — if your site looks and works exactly as it did three years ago and nobody has raised it — that's worth noticing. It usually isn't laziness. It's often that they're stretched, or that the person who used to care about your account has moved on.

You don't have to leave anyone to find out. Run the free audit on your own site and see what comes back. If it's clean, that's genuine reassurance and it cost you nothing. If it isn't, you've got specifics to take to whoever you're already paying — which is a perfectly good outcome too, and honestly the one I'd hope for if they've served you well.

That's the same reasoning behind the second-opinion angle for small businesses: an independent read on how things are actually going never hurt anyone doing good work.

What I'd like to help with

If you're an existing client: the tools above are available to you, and most of you aren't using them. If you've never had a proper walk-through of your own reporting, ask — that's exactly what the training qualification was for.

If you're new: the things I'm most useful for right now are a site that needs rebuilding properly, a store that needs moving or restructuring, an ongoing arrangement where somebody is actually watching your site, and getting a small team genuinely productive with AI rather than nervous about it.

Try the tools first — start small

I'd rather you tried something small than signed anything. The small-business plan is $29 a month with a 14-day free trial and no card required, covering one business: your website, your Google search performance and your Business Profile, in one monthly report written in English rather than dashboard.

Start there. If it's useful, keep it. If it isn't, you've lost nothing but a fortnight, and you'll still know more about your own website than you did.

If you'd rather just look first, the free audit needs nothing at all — no account, no email, about fifteen seconds.

Start with the free trial, or tell me what you're wrestling with.

See the small-business plan → Tell me what you need