Last week I spent five wonderful days in Peel, Isle of Man, photographing all the shops, businesses, organisations and their workers. The criteria for inclusion was simply that there was a “shop front” that is visible to the public, and that it lay within the town of Peel. I did this ten years ago too, so now we have a ten years on comparison and can see which businesses have closed or left, which are new, and who has simply moved along the street or around the corner (a surprising number!). I’ve yet to count the businesses I captured, but in […]

I’m very excited to be starting work on a project that has been a long time in the initiation stage. I have secured funding from Culture Vannin and other sponsors to repeat the work I did in Peel ten years ago to photograph and interview all businesses in the town that have a visible presence on the high street. It’s such valuable work to document social and economic trends in image format and will be of great interest to future generations. The outputs will be displayed on the new website manxshopfronts.com, and submitted to Manx National Heritage for […]

I was doing a little reminiscing as I hurtle towards 20 years as a website designer, thinking of some of the lovely projects I’ve been involved in, and I wondered how many different types of people and groups I have designed websites for.

It’s possible some have slipped my memory, but so far I have helped:

Holiday cottages (lots) and their professional body, local authorities (several), a roofing company, a garden office builder, a music teacher, a language teacher, a campervan converter and rental agency, B&Bs (lots), a farmer and a long distance walking farmer, a truck driver, a dentist, a quilt maker, […]

The new year has brought a flurry of activity to complete four projects that were initiated some time ago, ranging from 6 months, to 7 years! We have a new website for The Camper Company, a new business for an old client in the Isle of Man which will be hiring and converting campervans for people to enjoy the Manx countryside to the fullest. A new holiday cottage website for Wyndell Cruck Cottage on the northern tip of Peak District near Stocksbridge. And completing soon will be a site revamp for Visit Port Erin, and […]

Congratulations to Andrew Foxon and Go-Mann Adventures for winning the award of Isle of Man’s Leading Tour Operator 2020, from “World Travel Awards”.

My partner, Victoria, is starting a new venture for her Spanish language business. Moving from face to face to online teaching means now that the whole world is her oyster, not just local people in Sheffield. It’s been an exciting challenge to develop a new website to promote Spanish with Victoria alongside the development of the business model. We are launching the site early to capture some business before the Christmas period ready for an intensive online course to begin in January, and the website will develop enormously over the next couple of months.

Many of us are finding news ways of working in the Covid-19 environment and having to think a little differently about how to reach new clients. This has been the case for the owner of my latest website. Fiona Robinson is a music tutor specialising in flute, piano, recorder and music theory lessons. Pre-Covid all this work was done in face to face lessons; more recently she has moved to online teaching, and now, going forwards, it will be a combination of the two. Fiona’s new website, only days old, has already shown up in search results and yielded its first […]

Many of my clients have suffered big, or complete, losses of business over the last few months. I’m happy to have been able to work with one of them, Go-Mann Adventures, during this period to carry out a complete overhaul of their website in time for the coming weeks when they are able to resume their business. For Manx residents I can highly recommend their offering – do go to the new website for Go-Mann Adventures and choose a guided walk or skills course from the great selection on offer. UK residents will need to wait a […]

Starting in 2011 I began a series of photography projects involving documenting the whole retail areas of towns and villages in the Isle of Man. They were fun and fascinating, even at the time. But of course the real value of such projects is revealed years down the line when you can look back and see the changes. So I’m looking forward to repeating the first of the projects next year in Peel and revealing just how much has moved on. If you’d like to get involved, and, in particular, can suggest sources of funding for the work, please get in […]

My work is generally quite a solitary affair, but you can’t beat face to face to meetings at least once for every project to really to get to grips with the issues and ensure the best outcomes. In steps Covid-19 and turns all upside down. So now for the foreseeable, I’m proposing to use online methods for meetings, with Zoom being my preferred option, but I can accommodate clients’ own preferred methods, including Skype, Facetime, Whatsapp etc.