The person behind Power On.
Born and bred in Edinburgh. Designing websites here since before most agencies existed. Freelance, in South Gyle: not a small agency, not a team of five with a stock photo. One person who builds the site, does the local SEO, answers the phone and is still here long after it's live.
The short version.
Power On opened in October 2024. It wasn't a plan so much as a decision, made at a point when a lot of other things were uncertain.
Before any of this there was music. I started DJing at eighteen and it took me a good deal further than I expected, as far as Argentina, with a record that got to number two in Belgium and a couple of my own labels to run. A label is a small business with the volume up. Artwork, deadlines, distribution, promotion, and a lot of persuading people to care about something you made. I designed the websites for it myself, in Dreamweaver, before the millennium. Power On is two years old. The craft isn't.
Then came the sensible years. Sales, from a YTS trainee to an Account Executive at two global titans of enterprise software and cybersecurity. The accounts were names you'd know: airlines, a major international airport, Premier League football clubs. Rooms where a vague answer costs you the deal and everybody in them has done this before. I don't regret a minute of it, and it left me with something genuinely useful, because I've sat on the other side of enough of those conversations to know exactly what somebody is worrying about while they're being sold to. I'd rather not be that. But it was never the work I wanted to be doing.
So Power On isn't a career change. It's a return. The same instinct I had at eighteen, make something and put it in front of people, except now the thing I'm making is a small business getting found.
What the corporate years give it is discipline. I run a one person studio the way I was taught to run an enterprise account. Know the numbers, do what you said you'd do by the day you said you'd do it, and never let a client find something out from somebody else. Your business deserves that whether you're spending two thousand pounds or two million. Big company strategy, put to work for a small business.
The first year went better than I had any right to expect. An office, a Chamber of Commerce membership, two business expos, and a run of larger projects alongside the start ups and small firms I set out to help. Most of it came by word of mouth, which is the only marketing that means anything in this trade.
I have ADHD, diagnosed late, and I'll say so plainly because it's part of how I work rather than something to work around. Hyperfocus is the edge. When a build has my attention it has all of it, and the detail that other people find tedious is the part I enjoy. It's also why I built a system that runs the checks and the reminders, so nothing on your job depends on me happening to remember it.
Business Gateway published their own account of the first year in March 2026, if you want the longer version told by somebody other than me.
None of that is why you should hire me. The work is. But you should know who you're dealing with, because with Power On there's only one answer to that question.
How I work.
These are the parts I'd argue about with anyone, and the reasons people send other people my way.
No account manager, no handover to somebody you have not met, no explaining your business twice. The person you talk to on the first call is the person who builds it and the person who answers when you ring in two years.
I build new sites from the ground up on foundations I know are right. I do not take on somebody else's build to tidy up, because inheriting decisions I cannot see is a poor deal for both of us.
Most sites I am asked to look at, agency built ones included, are missing the basics. Weak titles, no heading structure, no location signals, no alt text. That work is part of the build here rather than an upsell afterwards.
Launch day is the start of the job. The sites I build get looked after, watched and kept current, and the local SEO work carries on every month.
Edinburgh and the Lothians. I know the areas, the trades and the competition, and I can show you where you rank street by street rather than guessing from one search on a phone.
If a site is not the thing that will fix your problem, I will say so. Reputation rides directly on the work when there is no agency name to hide behind.
The comparison.
What you want is agency results without the agency. The thinking, the process and the discipline that big businesses pay for, aimed at a business your size, by the person actually doing the work.
Someone sells it, someone else scopes it, someone junior builds it.
The same brain from the first call to the site you're still running in three years.
Agencies aren't bad at this. They're built for a different size of client, and you end up paying for the structure whether you use it or not. What clients tell me they wanted was a freelancer who thinks about the business rather than just the website. "He thinks like a business partner, not just a web developer." That one is Lucy's, not mine.
Power On sponsors the strips at Edinburgh United, my son's team, who play at Redhall Park in Longstone. Small things, but they're the reason I'm not a name on a website you can't reach.
The paperwork.
Memberships and certificates prove less than a client's own words, which is why they're down here rather than at the top. They're still worth knowing.
Half an hour, no pitch. Tell me what the business needs to do more of and I'll tell you honestly whether a new site is the thing that gets you there. If it isn't, I'll say so.
Rather see the work first? Have a look at recent projects.
