What We’ve Been Up To March 2026

Ending Q1 On A High

March has been a strong month. We’ve landed two big contracts, one of which is a fully bespoke website and multi-channel digital marketing package for a renewables heating company. It’s exactly the kind of client we love working with; ambitious, established, and with a project scope that lets us do what we do best across design, development and marketing. There’s plenty more in the pipeline too, which is keeping me busy with meetings and proposals.

Tools That are Changing How we Work

I’ve spoken a lot about Claude recently, which I’m now using every single day. New features are landing almost daily, and I genuinely believe that this, or tools like it, are going to completely transform businesses. We’re in a golden pocket right now where these tools are powerful, accessible, and still early enough that adopting them gives you a real edge. Twilo and the whole team need to embrace these tools before they are widely adopted. The earlier we commit, the more we benefit.

Back to the Seaside

We made our first trip of 2026 back to the caravan in Norfolk, and it was so nice to be there again. The seaside, the fresh air, and plenty of good food always clears the head. We’ll be making the most of our retreat this year, with a couple of weeks planned at the end of April.

Outside of Work

We had a family trip to Holmfirth this month, which was a lovely change of scenery, and I also got over to Manchester for an event with friends. Plenty of variety to keep the weekends interesting.

The radio show on LDC Radio is well underway and we’ve already had great feedback. After just one episode we were moved to an earlier slot, now broadcasting 7pm to 9pm every other Tuesday. Learning how to operate a radio studio ‘on the job’ is an experience in itself, because you’re never more than one click away from taking the whole station offline.

Tina

A highlight towards the end of the month was a trip to Leeds Grand to see the Broadway show, Tina, and it was Simply The Best! I’ve always been a big fan of Tina Turner and others from that era, having been brought up on music for the 70s and 80s, and of course growing up in the music boom of the 90s. You can’t beat a few power ballads on a school night!

Exciting Development Projects

It’s been a super productive month with some great project opportunities that has allowed me to continually learn and keep up with new technologies. Also Spring is back which means back to the garden grind.

In March, I worked on a website that aims to get enquiries for cable orders. What was really interesting with this build is that the website contains category pages, product pages and a basket but a user does not purchase anything. The basket is used to build up an enquiry and get a quote. All the products and categories are also pulled from a third party via an API.

This created some challenges for us to overcome. For example, once we started pulling from the API, we began to realise that the category pages were actually very slow at loading. We then had to solve this by creating a cache which ensured we weren’t requesting data from an API every time a user loads either the product page or the category page.

I’m very pleased with the outcome and I think that this was a very cool project to work on.

Utilising Claude AI in Website Development

The whole team has been utilising Claude AI much more recently in our workflows. For developers, this has been a compete time saver. Claude Code allows developers to specify what we want building. Claude then has the ability to read through any existing code and understand what needs to be built for the requested feature to work. Writing the briefs for Claude is a skill in itself and is something I have been getting good practice on.

The beauty of using Claude Code is that we still don’t lost control of quality. The settings we use allows developers to check everything that Claude wants to change before we allow it to continue. This gives developers an opportunity to correct Claude, suggest something is coded in a different way and to enforce our coding standards. Claude allows us to still plan out projects and make decisions on how functionality is achieved whilst taking care of the jobs that take up the most of our time.

Spring is Back and So are the Shrubs

I’ve spent some time in March getting back on top of the garden. As soon as a little bit of heat comes around, the grass and the bushes very quickly grow wild and out of control. In our garden, we have giant tree and an archway where roses grow over. The rose vine had gotten too big and collapsed over the path. The tree had also just taken over the whole garden, so we had to remove some branches.

I did get a new toy, a weed burner. I mainly got this to clear out weeds from the stone pavement, but it is very fun to use. Who knew it would be so satisfying to burn away weeds with fire.

Claude & Saviour

We’ve been working a lot more with Claude this month and it’s changed a lot of how we work.

We all went away and looked into how we can use Claude for our specific roles, within my role I can use Claude to give me a rundown of the performance of each ads campaign and suggest which areas of these campaigns to improve in for example.

We then came back together to present the pros and cons of Claude and how we’re going to implement it.

One thing that was very important and we made clear, is that Claude is like a junior, we don’t go to it to do all our work and ask it to do everything. We use it for suggestions and to streamline tasks that would usually take a lot of time.

We plan to meet monthly to share what we’ve learnt and what we’ve used Claude for in the month. These meetings are our ‘Claude & Saviour’ meetings.

Ice Hockey

At the beginning of March, I went to watch Leeds Knights at Elland Road in an Ice Hockey match against Basingstoke Bisons.

It was the first time I’ve ever watched Ice Hockey, and I had so much fun! I was sort of picking up the rules as the game went on, but it was so exciting and a much quicker pace than I expected.

The atmosphere was excellent too which really added to the game.

Championes Championes Ole Ole Ole

In mid-March my football team played in a cup final against local rivals Armley and we WON!! It was the first time I’ve won a cup since playing football since I was four and it was well worth the wait. Also, winning it with my parents and friends watching made it even more special.

It was all very different from the usual Saturday morning we are used to, with linesmen running the line and the whole match being filmed for YouTube.

The game finished 1-1 and it was decided on penalties, finishing 8-7 in the shootout. We were all absolutely buzzing and we deserved to win by being the better team in the final by a mile.

The win was followed by big celebrations, and a lot of beer was drunk.

Best Spicy Margs & Tacos in Town

For early birthday celebrations I went with some family to Neon Cactus in Leeds. I love Mexican food, so I’ve been wanting to go here for a while, especially because I’ve heard some good reviews and every review said it’s the best place in Leeds for a Spicy Margaritta and tacos.

The reviews weren’t lying! The food was delicious and the Spicy Margaritta hit the spot! I think we’ll definitely be making a return for some more food and drinks.

Birthday Celebrations

I turned 28 this month, which I think makes me sound very old! But I had a lovely day on my birthday.

I had the day off, so I went to Roundhay Park for a walk, then had a lovely meal out at the local pub and then my family came round to have a nice relaxed evening, chatting and catching up.

Then on the weekend, I went into Leeds with my friends where we went to a bottomless brunch, which my friend booked and thought it would be funny to book a Hannah Montana themed brunch, so the entire two hours was soundtracked by Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus songs. Which was actually better than it sounds.

Following the brunch we then went to project house for bongo’s bingo and the usual rowdy atmosphere that comes with bongo’s bingo followed. None of us won any games but we had so much fun.

Looking Ahead – The Show Goes on

After such a busy month, I’d be looking to relax and tone it down in April, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Like Leo says it The Wolf of Wall Street – ‘The show goes on!’

Getting Stuck Into A New Project

March has been a mix of new builds and ongoing improvements. The main one: a new site for an online sales company that specialises in computer and network cabling. It’s been a good project to get stuck into. The product range is pretty specific, so there’s been a lot of thinking around how to structure things so customers can actually find what they need without clicking through five pages. Getting the categories and navigation right on a site like that matters more than it might seem.

Alongside that, I’ve been building a few smaller one-page sites and making updates to existing pages for clients. Good balance between the bigger builds and quick turnaround jobs.

The Quiet Stuff

A good chunk of this month went into work that nobody really sees. Performance tweaks, tidying up older builds, and smoothing out things that could just work a bit better. It’s the kind of thing where the goal is for users to notice nothing at all. Pages load faster, things feel smoother, and the small annoyances disappear without anyone realising they were there. No before and after screenshots for this stuff, but it’s what keeps everything running the way it should.

Away From the Screen

Outside of work, March has been packed. I went to a Dungeons & Dragons night that one of my mates runs. I’ve played a few times before, but this time we started a Stranger Things themed campaign which has been a lot of fun. Definitely something I’d keep going back to.

The weather’s finally turning, so I’ve been making the most of it with more walks. Malham Cove was the standout. Stunning spot and well worth the drive if you haven’t been. It was also a filming location for Deathly Hallows. Didn’t spot any Death Eaters, but the wind up there was doing a good impression of a Dementor.

And to cap the month off, I got to see Gorillaz live. Hearing Melancholy Hill and Clint Eastwood in person was something else. One of those gigs that sticks with you.

What’s Next

March has been a solid month. Good mix of dev work, behind the scenes improvements, and getting out while the weather’s letting me. On to April.

Improving Engagement

This month I’ve been focusing a lot on engagement strategies and how we can improve these across our clients’ social channels. It’s easy to measure things like reach and impressions, but I’ve been looking more closely at how people are actually interacting with content and what encourages them to engage in a more meaningful way. That’s led to some useful shifts in how we’re planning posts and structuring content.

Alongside that, I’ve been working on getting ahead with scheduling to account for some time off. That’s meant thinking further ahead than usual, planning content well in advance and making sure everything is lined up to go out at the right time. It’s been a good exercise in time management and making sure nothing gets rushed or overlooked.

I’ve also continued working with new clients, which is always one of the most interesting parts of the role. Getting to understand each business, their tone, their audience and what they want to achieve means every account feels slightly different, which keeps things fresh.

A big part of the month has also been spent researching how social media platforms are evolving, particularly in terms of algorithms and reach. Looking at how content is prioritised, what formats are performing well, and how small changes can improve visibility has been really useful in shaping how we approach upcoming content.

Outside of Work

It’s been a busy month outside of work as well, with my son turning three. We took him to a hotel he loves that has a pool for the night, followed by a trip to a farm the next day, which he absolutely loved!

I’ve also been getting everything ready for a big holiday that we leave for tomorrow, so there’s been a lot of last-minute organising alongside everything else. Looking forward to switching off for a bit and will have more to share on that next month.

Getting into MCP

Did a deep dive on MCP servers this month, creating a few that did various different jobs, from allowing company documentation to be queryable to giving us a way to conversationally manage our projects and timelines. What I’ve found is that the actual design of the MCP server makes a big difference in how useful it is. When you’re creating an MCP to let AI access a third-party web api, you might think that the approach would be to create a tool for each api endpoint, but it doesn’t seem to work out the best. It’s better to actually think about the tasks you need AI to be able to perform, and build those as bespoke tools. For example, if I ask it to assign a developer to a project, it can go ahead and find that there is “search_users”, “search_projects” and “update_project” tools, and coordinate those tools to achieve what you need, but this often ends up using a lot of credits, where a “assign_person_to_project” tool would get it done much more efficiently.

Carving out Some Free Time

Outside of work I’ve taken up wood carving. I’ve only made one piece so far, a fox, following a youtube tutorial, but it’s pretty cool. It turned out pretty rough, but I learned a lot in the process of making it, and I think the second attempt will be much better. I was surprised by how much hand strength was needed, and how many times I would have given myself a really bad cut if it wasn’t for the safety gloves. It was really nice to have some time away from screens, these days I think I need more reasons to do that.

Roles Filled!

Recruitment for our BDM role has kept me busy this month with fielding lots of applications and making interview arrangements. We have now filled the role and have not one but two BDMs starting with us in April.

I have become more involved with our current projects this month in supporting the team with monitoring dates and details, tidying up tasks and making sure everything is clear and up to date as regards project progress. I have enjoyed this additional role and doing a bit of project Spring-cleaning!

Cinema and Sunshine

Outside of work, I have had a few cinema trips this month. Firstly EPiC – a film of Elvis Presley in concert with restored and remastered footage and sound which was surprisingly interesting and dare I say, exhilarating! Then accompanying my daughter to see Enhyphen in concert – less exhilarating and more of an endurance test for me, but she enjoyed it which was the main thing! Lastly a recording of the recent performance of Giselle by the Royal Ballet at the ROH – the closest you can get to going to the live performance, and beautiful to watch.

I’ve also enjoyed the few sunny days we’ve finally had and watching the garden start to show signs of life with a few Spring flowers coming out, always an uplifting sight!