We’re closing our doors for Christmas at 5:30pm on Friday 19th December. If we host your site, our hosting monitoring will be continuing 24/7 over the holiday period. If we don’t host your site, or you’d like to be able to contact us in any other sort of emergency, please do email me by COB on the 12th December so we can put arrangements in place.

It’s been another busy year here at 18a!

We’ve designed, built and launched sites such as Get the nation learning, for the Learning & Work Institute, and added features to others such as a Woo ecommerce shop for the Mendips National Landscape. Next year I’ll be better at keeping our case studies up to date!

We’ve helped 2 big organisations – one a charity, one a community and education business – launch new community platforms, with very complex and unique requirements. And we’ve kept an army of inherited WordPress sites (by “inherited” I mean sites other people built and then the organisations came to us to keep them afloat when things got tricky) running smoothly and growing in all the right ways.

SEO has been on the agenda more again this year, with clients shifting from taking our training to learn how to do it themselves, to employing us to do it. I was very happy to do an end-of-year report this week and be able to report a 216% gain in visitors from search engine traffic, just due to technical SEO on a site that was already getting 100% as a best practice score from Google.

We’ve won not 1 but 2 Web Excellence awards – one for our events system on activibees, which is the only place on the web where charities can sell tickets for free, and one for our very technical work on OilPrice.com (I still need to write up that award win actually).

And in the last Quarter alone, we’ve built and launched AIProfiles to help brands of all sizes with their Structured Data, and built – but not yet publicly launched – our exciting new monitoring service.

We’ve continued to experiment with AI (read our comparison of Google and Gemini here, how we tricked Gemini here, and our initial thoughts on NLWeb here) and I recently wrote a guide on how to get mentioned by LLMs such as ChatGPT which has been downloaded hundreds of times already – you can get a copy here.

The part of the year I’m perhaps the most excited about, is that I’ve made a real effort to carve out time to blog more again. And combining that with making an effort to show up on Instagram and LinkedIn, I’m growing a Knowledge Base of helpful web articles and guides which I’m sharing with anyone who wants to learn more about the web. I’ve always felt that if people understand what they’re working with, it makes projects run more smoothly and really helps budgets.

What’s in store for 2026?

Next year, we’re going to launch our new monitoring tool, designed to help businesses of all sizes save time and money with their websites, and I’m tweaking my weekly Talking Web newsletter to focus on “One thing to do on your website this week”, each week.

So many people feel they neglect their website because it takes time and headspace and effort they don’t have, so join my newsletter and get weekly prompts on things to do so that you keep moving things forward in a positive direction without having to strategize your socks off (cos I’ll be doing that for you).

We’ve also got a couple of big client launches already planned – the sites are built and their teams are just tweaking the final bits of copy. As well as more work around the Meta Ads Conversion API and GA4 goal conversions to help our clients really understand what’s working in their marketing and advertising.

If you need a hand with your website – whether it’s building a new one, taking over the reigns of an existing one so that you know it’s in safe hands, or just a bit of consultancy / strategy about what your next step should be, please do get in touch.