The builder

It began in marketing and desktop publishing, which was where the web arrived first and where nobody senior was watching. That turned out to be the ideal place to be standing in 1996.

Five of those years ran internet communications for Cardiff Harbour Authority: web development, bilingual content, event branding and stakeholder engagement across the Bay. Bilingual work teaches you something permanent. If a structure only holds in one language, it was never a structure.

Then project lead for the redevelopment of cardiff.gov.uk. Eighteen service departments, each with its own structure, its own habits and its own view of who the site was for, consolidated into a single platform that met W3C AA and Shaw Trust accreditation throughout. Accessibility at that scale is not a checklist at the end. It is a structural decision taken at the beginning, and holding it across eighteen sets of stakeholders is where I learned that architecture is mostly a negotiation.

The last two years were spent as principal IT security consultant: application security policy, penetration testing, and training developers to write code that did not leave the front door open.

Fifteen years owning and running a country pub with my husband. Payroll, licensing, marketing, staff, suppliers, the lot. We took it through COVID on Welsh Government grants and outdoor dining, and concluded a fifteen year full repairing lease with the landlord relationship intact.

I never stopped building, either. Websites, branding and ecommerce for other small businesses ran alongside the pub the whole time, which is why the two halves of this page are not really two halves. I was the client and the developer in the same week, often on the same afternoon.

An independent consultancy in Cowbridge, and deliberately a small one. Three things: strategic web development, digital architecture, and practical AI. They sound like three services and they are really one, because a website that is not connected to how the business actually runs is just a brochure that took longer.

The clients tend to be founder-led: a school, an estate agent, a restaurant, a pub under new ownership, a town centre with forty owners and no decision-maker. What they have in common is that the website is one part of a larger operation rather than the whole of it, and that somebody has to keep running it after I have gone.

Every project runs through the same five stages in the same order, because the order is what stops the expensive mistakes: Audit, Architecture, Discovery, Flow, Sustainability. The weight shifts every time. The sequence does not.

You talk to the person who audits it, designs it, builds it and hands it over. That is the whole studio.

I use AI every working day: writing, design, research, code, and the awkward middle part of a build where you need a second opinion at eleven at night. Not one tool, several, deliberately, because they are good at different things and the differences matter more than the marketing does.

Which is the only reason I am any use to you on this. I am not reporting what AI can supposedly do. I know where it saves a real afternoon, and I know where it will confidently produce something plausible and wrong. Telling a client which is which is most of the job.

I photograph buildings, in black and white, almost always. Vaults, gates, staircases, scaffolds, anything that holds something else up. It is not research and I did not choose it for the metaphor, but I have stopped pretending the two are unrelated.

Galleries for the same reason. Bilbao, mostly, and anything by Bourgeois. I am drawn to work that looks impossible and is in fact held up by something absolutely rigorous underneath, which is either a coincidence or the whole of my thinking.

Grade 7 piano. Fluent French, intermediate Welsh, and enough Spanish and Portuguese to be polite. Skiing and walking, usually in that order of enthusiasm.