Hello, I’m James.

Why Rainy Peaks exists

A couple of years ago I started noticing the same conversation happening everywhere, at family gatherings, in pubs, with friends who run trades businesses and shops and small practices. It went like this: “I know our website’s not doing us any favours. I just don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I don’t know who to ask.”

The people asking weren’t daft. They were busy, running real businesses, looking after customers and staff, without a spare afternoon to learn what Core Web Vitals are. And the help on offer was all wrong for them: agencies quoting five figures for a template, cold callers promising page one of Google, and platforms that hold your site hostage the moment you stop paying.

Rainy Peaks exists to be the missing option: one experienced person who’ll look at your website, tell you honestly what’s costing you enquiries (and what isn’t worth touching), and build it properly if you want the help.

The background I bring

I’ve spent my career in product management and enterprise software, the job of standing between complicated technology and the people who need it to just work. That’s included designing interfaces people use every day, obsessing over page performance, building on AWS and modern cloud tooling, and, importantly for this work, a strong grounding in accessibility and web security.

That last part matters more than people expect. Most small business websites fail their visitors in ways nobody notices: unreadable on a phone, unusable with a keyboard, four seconds slower than they should be. Every site I build starts by getting that right.

How I work

• Plain English, always. If I can’t explain it simply, I don’t understand it well enough, and you shouldn’t pay for it.
• Fixed prices. Scoped and agreed up front. No day rates, no meters running.
• Honesty over sales. If your site needs three fixes rather than a rebuild, your free review will say exactly that.
• Independence. I don’t resell hosting or take platform commissions. Recommendations are based on what fits you.
• You own everything. The code, the content, the domain, the hosting account, all yours, all in your name. Nothing is designed to make you dependent on me.

Why “Rainy Peaks”?

Because it’s named after the two things you can’t avoid up here: the rain and the hills. Manchester weather and the Peaks on the doorstep are the backdrop to every business I work with, and they set the standard I build to. Things made for this part of the world are built plainly, built to last, and expected to work on the worst day rather than the best one.

A website is no different. Yours will be judged on a cracked phone screen, on a bad signal, by someone stood outside in the drizzle deciding whether to call you. That’s the day it has to earn its keep, so that’s the day I design for.

If that sounds like the sort of studio you want in your corner, the first conversation is free, and it’s a conversation, not a pitch.