Looking back
Looking back at my career, it would be easy to describe it as a series of changes. I started in design, then moved into videography, websites, development, automation and AI. More recently, I have found myself becoming increasingly involved in sales, SEO, Google Ads, analytics and marketing.
Written down like that, it sounds like I kept changing careers. I don’t think that is what actually happened. The more I look at the work I do today, the more obvious it becomes that I simply kept learning the next part of the same journey. One skill exposed another problem, that problem required another skill, and eventually all of those skills started connecting.
Design taught me how to communicate. Videography taught me how to tell a story. Websites taught me how to make that communication interactive. Development taught me how to build what happens behind the interface. Automation taught me to think about what happens inside the business after somebody interacts with it. Product development made me think about how repeated problems could become reusable systems. Sales and marketing are now teaching me how the right people find those systems in the first place.
None of the earlier skills disappeared. If anything, they are becoming more useful now because I can finally see how they fit together.
Design taught me that communication comes first
My foundation was design. In the beginning, a lot of the focus was naturally visual. Does this look right? Do the colours work? Does the typography fit? Is the composition balanced? But the more design work you do, the more you realise that making something look good is only part of the job. Good design communicates.
What should somebody notice first? What matters most? What information can be removed? How do you make something complex easier to understand? How does a brand create a feeling before somebody has even read the copy? At the time, I thought these were design questions. Now I realise they were also UX questions, marketing questions and even sales questions. I just didn’t have those labels for them yet.
Videography taught me how to control the story
Videography added something design could not: time. With a static design, you control what somebody sees. With video, you also control what they see next. Timing matters, pacing matters and the opening matters. There needs to be a reason for somebody to keep watching, and information needs to arrive in the right order.
You are not only presenting something anymore. You are taking somebody through something. Years later, I see exactly the same thinking in websites, advertising and sales. An advert needs a hook. A landing page has a sequence. A sales conversation has a progression.
A website visitor normally does not arrive ready to immediately do whatever you want them to do. They move through information, evaluate what they are seeing, build trust and compare. Then, hopefully, they act. The medium changed. The thinking didn’t.
Websites made communication interactive
Websites changed the problem again. A poster does not need somebody to click anything. A video does not need somebody to complete a form. A website does. Once I started building websites, the question stopped being only, “Does this look good?” It became, “What do I actually want this person to do?”
That changes how you look at the entire design. Navigation matters because somebody needs to find something. Page structure matters because somebody is making a decision. Calls to action matter because there needs to be a next step. Mobile matters because that may be where most of the interaction happens.
A booking form, contact form, checkout or quote request isn’t simply a feature. It is part of the customer’s journey through the business. That was probably one of the first points where my design thinking started becoming conversion thinking. I just wasn’t calling it conversion optimisation yet.
Development took me behind the screen
Eventually, the visible side of the website wasn’t enough. Clients needed more than pages. Products had to behave properly. Payments had to work. Forms needed to go somewhere. Customers needed accounts. Different systems needed to communicate with each other.
So I kept going deeper. WordPress became more than a way to arrange pages. WooCommerce became more than adding products to an online store. I started working across PHP, JavaScript, APIs, databases, React, TypeScript, hosting, integrations and the systems sitting behind the website. The technology became more complicated, but something else was changing at the same time. I was beginning to understand that the best technical solution depends on understanding how the business actually works.
One example was building a quote-first ecommerce experience for a medical sales and distribution company. A standard ecommerce checkout did not make sense for the way their customers purchased. Their buyers needed to browse products, select what they required and submit those products for a quote. So instead of trying to force the company into the normal ecommerce model, the website had to follow the actual sales process.
That project involved custom WooCommerce work, quote workflows and front-end behaviour, but the most important question wasn’t technical. How does this business actually sell? Once that was clear, the technology could support the business rather than dictate how the business should operate.
I saw the same thing again when working with WHMCS and VPS sales. The website was only the beginning. Behind it were packages, billing, payments, client accounts, recurring services, automation and infrastructure. The customer’s experience depended on all of those pieces working together. I had moved from thinking about pages to thinking about systems.
Then I started paying attention to what happened after the website
Development exposes another layer of the problem. Once you understand how the website works, you start noticing everything around it. Someone submits a form. What happens next? A prospect asks a question. Where does that information go? A sales team receives a lead. What context do they actually have? Why is somebody manually copying information from one system into another?
Those questions pulled me toward APIs, automation, CRM systems and AI. One of the projects that made this shift particularly obvious involved connecting an AI-powered website experience with a CRM workflow. Visitors could interact with an AI service recommender on the website, those interactions could later be connected with a form submission, and automation could turn that information into useful context for the sales team.
The interesting part wasn’t simply that AI was involved. The important part was that the website interaction became something the business could act on. That changed the question again. It was no longer only, “How do I build this website?” It became, “What should happen inside the business when the website does its job?”
Repeated problems eventually became a product
After working with enough websites, businesses and content workflows, patterns become difficult to ignore. Different companies repeatedly struggle with similar things: creating content consistently, keeping branding consistent, getting content reviewed and approved, giving different people the correct level of access, publishing, updating website content, understanding performance, and keeping all of it organised without moving between a pile of disconnected systems.
Those repeated problems became part of the thinking behind the Multimedia Dashboard I am building now. It started much smaller. Today it is developing into a multi-tenant SaaS platform built around content creation, collaboration, approvals, publishing, website management, analytics and related business workflows.
What makes the project particularly interesting to me is that almost every part of my career has influenced it. My design background affects how I think about branded content. My experience building websites affects how I think about usability for people who are not developers. My development experience allows me to build the systems and integrations behind those experiences. Years of client work influence how I think about collaboration and approvals. Marketing influences how I think about content, publishing and analytics. Running my own business increasingly affects decisions around customers, pricing, service levels and scale.
At some point I stopped only asking, “How do I solve this problem for this client?” I started asking, “How many other businesses have the same problem?” That is a completely different way of thinking. It is the difference between building a solution and building a product.
Marketing moved me to the beginning of the journey
There was still one major part of the picture that I wanted to understand better. We can build the website. We can build the systems behind it. We can create the content. But where are the customers coming from?
That question has pulled me much deeper into marketing and sales. SEO, Google Ads, search intent, landing pages, conversion tracking, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Search Console, Microsoft Clarity, keyword research and campaign messaging are becoming less separate from the work I was already doing.
When I look at a Google Ads campaign now, I am not only interested in whether an advertisement received clicks. I want to know what somebody searched, why they searched it, whether that search suggests real commercial intent, why they chose one result over another, and what happened once they reached the website. I want to know whether the landing page delivered what the advert promised, where people stopped, whether the calls to action worked, whether we are measuring the right things and, ultimately, whether that traffic is actually valuable to the business.
For years, much of my work began once somebody reached the website. Marketing has forced me to move further toward the beginning of the customer journey. I am now looking at what happens before the website visit as well.
This is where all the old skills start coming back
This is probably the most interesting part of the progression for me. The older skills are not being replaced. They are making the newer skills stronger.
Imagine a Google Ads campaign is bringing visitors to a landing page but the campaign is not generating enough enquiries. The search terms could be wrong. That is marketing. The offer might not match what the person actually wanted. That is marketing and sales. The page hierarchy might be confusing. That is design. The copy might not take somebody through the decision properly. That is communication and storytelling.
The mobile experience could be creating friction. That is UX. The conversion tracking might be incorrect. That is development and analytics. The form itself might be broken. That is development. The lead might reach the business with no useful context for the person who needs to follow up. That is systems and automation.
I no longer see those as completely separate problems. They affect each other, and being able to move between those disciplines changes the way I approach the problem.
It has changed how I think about sales too
For a long time, I probably thought about sales as something that happened around the work. Now I increasingly see it as part of the work. Selling becomes much easier to understand when you understand what needs to happen after the sale.
If I am discussing a website with someone today, I am not only thinking about how many pages they need. I am thinking about who they are trying to reach, what that customer might be searching for, what needs to be communicated when they arrive, what action actually matters to the business, how that action will be measured, what happens after the enquiry, how the business is going to manage the website and content afterwards, what can be automated, what needs human involvement, and whether the website we are discussing is even the correct solution to the actual problem.
That is a very different conversation from simply quoting for five pages and a contact form.
AI accelerated everything, but it didn’t create the skills
AI has obviously had a huge impact on the way I work. I use it heavily for research, analysing ideas, development, working through documentation, content, automation, analysing data and exploring different approaches before choosing one. I also build AI into systems where it makes practical sense.
But there is an important distinction. AI didn’t suddenly give me all of these skills. It accelerated the combination of skills that were already there. If I use AI for development, I still need to understand whether the system makes sense. If I use it for design, I still need visual judgement. If I use it for marketing, I still need to understand the business objective. If I use it to analyse advertising performance, I still need to know what question I am trying to answer.
If AI gives me the wrong answer, I need enough knowledge to recognise that something is wrong. What AI has changed dramatically is the speed at which I can move between disciplines. I can investigate a problem, analyse documentation, work through code, test an idea and move into another part of the project far faster than I could before.
It has increased how much I can execute. But the judgement behind that execution still matters. Probably more than ever.
I don’t know what the perfect job title is anymore
That brings me to where I am now. I am not sure one traditional job title describes what I do particularly well anymore. Designer feels too narrow. Developer feels too narrow. Marketer feels too narrow. Product builder probably comes closer, but that still leaves parts out. I’m also not sure finding the perfect title matters.
What interests me now is the complete journey: how an idea becomes a message, how that message gets someone’s attention, how attention becomes interest, how someone moves through a digital experience, how the technology supports that experience, how information moves through the business afterwards, how results are measured, how those results affect what gets changed next, and ultimately how all of those pieces contribute to a commercial result.
Looking back, I don’t think I changed careers as many times as it might appear. I kept following the same problem further.
Design taught me how to communicate. Video taught me how to tell the story. Websites taught me how to make communication interactive. Development taught me how to build the experience and the systems behind it. Automation taught me what should happen after somebody interacts with those systems. Product development taught me how repeated problems can become something scalable. Sales and marketing are teaching me how the right people discover those things in the first place.
The interesting part is no longer any one of those skills on its own. It is finally being able to use all of them together.