Can you remember exactly when you qualified as a coach? For me, it was August 2000. Back then, not many people even knew what coaching was. I learned marketing the way you probably did: by needing clients and not having them. I went to the networking breakfasts. I gave the talks. I marketed myself as a general life coach because I didn’t know any better, and it was hard — until I niched down to time management coaching and watched, almost overnight, how much easier marketing becomes when you stand for one thing. That lesson has never left me, and it’s in every site I build.
Around then I got my first web design quote: £2,295 plus VAT for eight pages — plus at least £100 every time I wanted a sentence changed. I walked away. Not because a website wasn’t worth it, but because dependency wasn’t. A quarter of a century later, coaches still tell versions of that story: the site they can’t edit, the domain that turns out not to be in their name, the designer they have to pay to change a comma. I felt that wound before it had a name, and every engagement I take is structured so you never feel it with me.
Builder by necessity
By 2003 I’d become Director of Life Coaching at the UK College of Life Coaching, and I kept watching the same film: excellent new coaches who couldn’t market themselves. So I started Authentic Practice to help coaches get clients — and, on my mentor’s advice, taught myself HTML and CSS to build my own site, lead magnet and weekly newsletter. It worked. The enquiries came. My first online clients came. I learned, hands on the keyboard, that a coaching website is a marketing instrument first and an object second.
The honest part: why I left
By 2007 I had a full practice — and a realisation. I’d built a job. My income lived and died by my presence, one hour at a time. So I did what I’d tell any coach in that position to at least consider: I went to solve the leverage problem. I moved into information publishing, and in December 2008 I launched a $77 product that did $4,158 in five days — modest by internet-guru mythology, real by any honest standard.
I won’t dress this up: from then until recently, I was not building websites for coaches. What never stopped was stranger and, it turns out, more useful. The marketing obsession kept compounding — twenty-five years of direct-response study, the Bencivenga school: the believable claim beats the bigger claim. And a habit I picked up somewhere between an engineering degree and an R&D lab in a medical device company: I put websites on the bench. To this day I can’t visit a coach’s site without running it through the performance tools to see what it weighs, what it loads, what a visitor’s phone is silently being asked to do. For years that habit had no commercial point. It was just how an engineer looks at things.
Why now
Through all of it, one gap kept me out of this market, and I knew it: I could always see good design — I could never quite build it. My own pages were tidy and a bit boxy. And I watched the market reward beautiful, heavy sites built by designers who couldn’t see the layer I could. Coming back to compete on their terms, with my weakest skill, would have been foolish. So I didn’t.
Then the tools changed. Working with AI, in long back-and-forth sessions, I can finally translate what I’ve always been able to judge into pages I’m proud to sign. I’ll be plainer about this than most in my trade: I design in conversation with AI, and the judgement — what a coach’s site must say, how it should read, what it’s allowed to weigh — is mine. AI gave me hands to match my eye. What it can’t give anyone is the eye itself, or twenty-five years of knowing what makes a coaching client say yes. The moment my one gap closed, I came back. That’s the whole reason. It happens to be true, which is the kind of reason I prefer.
What I believe your website is up against
The way clients find coaches is changing again. Increasingly they ask AI systems a question and get back two or three names. Those systems read the web the way a hurried, brilliant intern would — favouring sites that are fast, cleanly structured and genuinely written. Nobody can honestly promise you a place in those answers; anyone who does is selling. What I can do is make your site legible to that new reader and pleasant for the old one — and show you, in numbers you can verify yourself, exactly what it weighs and how it reads. This site is the demonstration: no trackers, no popups, nothing between my words and you.
How I work
- The X-ray. Before anything else, your current site goes on the bench: what it weighs, how many servers it calls, how it reads to the AI systems your future clients are asking — each finding tied to what it costs you in plain language. Free, written, honest. Sometimes the honest answer is: your site is fine.
- The conversation. If the film shows something, we talk — about who you’ve become as a coach and what your site should carry of that.
- The build. Design, copy and performance treated as one discipline, because on your website they are one discipline. You review real pages, not wireframes.
- The handover. A site you can edit yourself, in plain language, that you own outright — domain, hosting, everything in your name. No dependency on me. That’s the promise a younger me couldn’t get for £2,295.
A quiet promise. I keep the practice small and I don’t take projects I don’t believe in. If I’m not the right builder for you, the X-ray will say so and point you somewhere better.
Beyond the desk
I live and work in Nottingham. Before websites there was an engineering degree, a materials science masters, and a lab where I helped build medical devices — which may explain why I still think diagnosis before treatment. I read paper books, which is probably why every site I build looks a little like one.
If your website has fallen behind the coach you’ve become, I’d genuinely like to see it. It costs you nothing but a URL.