Meet Ashley Whitehair.

It started with a restaurant review site. I wanted one, nobody was going to build it for me, so I taught myself. That was back when HTML tables were how you did layout, which will mean nothing at all to most people and quite a lot to any developer reading this. It had a few good years before it came down.

WordPress I fell into by chance not long after, and never looked back. Twenty years on, I’ve yet to find something a client needed that it couldn’t do. Most people don’t really know what WordPress is, and that’s fine. What matters is that it’ll do very nearly anything, and once it’s built, you can run it yourself.

A lot of those years have been spent contracting for agencies, so I know how they work and the standard they hold. For three of them I worked with Elementor, whose HQ is in Tel Aviv: first as their community content manager, then contracting for a year writing the material that teaches people how to use their software. If you’ve ever followed an Elementor guide to get yourself unstuck, there’s a decent chance you were reading something of mine.

I’ve stayed one person on purpose. I like being my own boss, and being responsible for every part of a project rather than a slice of it. Nothing gets lost in a handover, because there isn’t one, and the person you email in year three is the person who built it in year one.

I live in Norwich with my wife and our fox red labrador, Stance. Born and raised here, and I’ve never found much reason to leave. Away from the desk I’m usually outdoors or in the gym: walking Stance, hiking, running, lifting, a bit of CrossFit, and a game of padel when I can get one.

I’m on LinkedIn if you’d like to look me up, though I should warn you I’m hardly ever on it. I’ve never really got on with the place. Email is the way to reach me.