Founder
Hi, I'm Damian.
I'm based in Churchtown, Southport. Have been most of my life. The name on the tin is not a marketing choice, it's where I actually live.
I've spent 20 years building websites and the last 15 obsessing over how to make them rank and convert. Former British Army, Queen's Guards. Self-taught developer. The discipline from the first career still shapes how I approach the second.
I started Churchtown Media because I wanted to build things properly for businesses that deserved better than what the agency market usually gives them. A lot of client work later, I also built the Sefton Coast Network, which is described below.
The proof of concept
The Sefton Coast Network
Before I pitch anything to a client, I built it for myself first. Four editorial sites covering the Sefton Coast, built on the same technical stack I use for client work, with no brief and no safety net.
SouthportGuide.co.uk is the broadest: a full visitor guide to Southport covering restaurants, hotels, things to do, events, and two significant upcoming moments for the town. The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in July 2026, and the Marine Lake Events Centre opening in 2027. The site has a business directory, a blog, and booking integrations. 999+ venues listed.
FormbyGuide.co.uk exists because no dedicated guide to Formby existed anywhere online. The National Trust covers their own estate and stops at the car park gate. TripAdvisor is generic. There was a genuine editorial gap and nobody was filling it.
SeftonLinks.com covers the links golf corridor: Royal Birkdale, Hillside, Formby Golf Club, West Lancashire, Southport & Ainsdale, Southport Old Links. Six courses, 18 languages, course conditions, tee time links, scorecards, and an Open 2026 hub. I built it partly because I play golf badly and wanted somewhere better than the club websites to find out what I needed to know before booking.
SeftonCoastWildlife.co.uk is the one that surprised me most in the building. It's a 257-species database covering birds, mammals, insects and plants found between Southport and Formby. The Sefton Coast is a Special Area of Conservation and there was nowhere pulling it all together into something actually readable.
All four sites run on the same foundation: Next.js App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, deployed to Vercel. They cross-link editorially, not with generic footer links but with genuine contextual references placed where a real reader would benefit.
The network is both the proof of concept for everything I build for clients, and a commercial project in its own right. If you want to see what a properly engineered content site looks like, technically and editorially, this is it.
Visitor guide, business directory, Open 2026 hub. 999+ venues.
Next.js · Prisma · PostgreSQL · Vercel
Red squirrels, National Trust beach, pinewoods, village dining.
Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 · Vercel
Championship links golf in 18 languages. Royal Birkdale and 5 more.
Next.js · next-intl · 18 locales · Vercel
257-species database. Birds, mammals, insects, plants.
Next.js · TypeScript · Plausible Analytics
How I work
No fluff. No vanity metrics. Just things that work.
I don't start a project by asking what you want the website to look like. I start by asking what you need it to do, who needs to find it, and what stops them finding it now. The design follows the function.
Every site I build is on Next.js. Not because it's fashionable but because it's genuinely fast, because static generation means you don't pay for server infrastructure you don't need, and because it gives Google exactly what it needs to index your site properly. WordPress does not do any of these things reliably.
SEO is not mysterious. It's content that answers real questions, pages that load quickly, structured data that tells Google what you do, and links from places that genuinely matter. I've been doing this for 15 years. The fundamentals have not changed. What changes is the sophistication of the execution.
I'm not interested in black-hat tactics or quick-fix strategies that get penalised in six months. I build things that compound. Year two should be better than year one.
Rankings, traffic, leads, enquiries. That is what matters. If a metric doesn't connect to one of those four things, I'm not tracking it.
The stack I use for everything
Outside work
Walking Marshside with the kids. Badly playing golf (I've at least played Royal Birkdale once, which I've documented). The Owl & Bird of Prey Sanctuary is a regular with the family. I have a healthy respect for anyone who can keep a Harris hawk interested in them for more than five minutes.
The name Churchtown Media comes from the area of Southport where this all started. It seemed fitting.
If your site needs to do more
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