Welcome. A short hello from Colin Shove and what's here.

I’m Colin. This is my personal blog, and this is the first post.

My work has been technology for these sectors: salon businesses, professional services, trades, and other local businesses, building websites and writing training content.

A few years ago I learned something about websites that I haven’t been able to unsee. I was running a different part of a business at the time, one that needed to compete not locally but globally. The site we built did the job, and it taught me how much of a difference a properly built site actually makes. We were competing with, and beating, companies spending many times what we were.

The thing that stayed with me wasn’t the result. It was looking around at the small businesses I knew, doing brilliant work, and realising lots of them had been sold sites that, in some cases, were little more than a directory. A name, an address, a phone number, a list of services. Not much else. Not because their providers couldn’t do better. Because their clients couldn’t tell the difference.

That felt wrong to me. It still does.

When you apply the technology used in global marketing sites to local sites, the magic happens. That is most of what I do now, and a lot of what this blog is about.

Not all of it is about websites though. Marketing, how a small business actually runs day to day, the conversations people have with their customers. One idea per post. No fluff, no jargon, no twenty-paragraph preambles before the point.

If you run a local business, a professional service, a trade, or a salon, you’ll probably find something useful here. There’s a filter on the homepage so you can narrow posts down to the kind of work you do.

It’s worth saying what this isn’t. It isn’t a funnel. I’m not selling anything from this site, there’s no lead magnet, no upsell, no popups. If you want to follow along, the email signup at the bottom of any post or the RSS feed will do the job. If you don’t, the writing is right here, free to read.

One thing I’d genuinely value: feedback. If a post lands, tell me. If it doesn’t, tell me that too. Comments are open at the bottom of every post, or you can reach me directly. Honest feedback is the quickest way for the writing to get better, and I’d rather hear it than not.

More to come.