Building since 2004
I’ve been building websites and applications since 2004. The site is the entry point. The job is everything behind it: the data, the booking, the follow-up, the reporting, and the code that connects them. Most of it breaks for one reason. The person who built it moved on and nobody took it over.
From cable to code
I’m Mark Russell. Since 2004 I’ve built websites, web applications, and iOS and Android apps for small businesses, and for some of them the whole operation: brand, marketing, and the system that runs the day. The theme this site runs on is mine, written from scratch and built to WordPress.org submission standards. I write plugins. I built a site-auditing tool in Python that renders pages in a real browser and catches what checklists miss: layouts that scroll sideways on a phone, images that never finish loading, buttons nobody can tap.
Most recently I worked inside an enterprise CRM carrying more than 700,000 ticket orders on SQL Server. I pulled a report out of a dead binary library nobody could open anymore and rebuilt it, validated, in production. I replaced a 16,541-row marketing list nobody could explain with a criteria-driven process that regenerates on demand and shows its work. I checked a board-facing dashboard against the base tables with a 13-script SQL package and found a stale snapshot and a field crediting gifts to the wrong place.
I’ve also spliced fiber for a ski lift’s control system, run point of sale across twenty bar stations during live performances, and replaced a dead payment terminal alone, inside an hour, with no vendor on the phone.
I take the whole thing: the site, the hosting, the domain, the accounts, the forms, the backups, the integrations. I build it, document it, and put it in your name. You get a plain-English map of what you own and where it lives, and if you ever leave, you take all of it with you, working.
How I build
Simplicity is survival
The simplest thing that does the job is the one still standing when the clever one has fallen over. I build for the long run, not the demo.
Reliable systems fail gracefully
Things break. Good systems degrade in ways you can see and recover from, instead of going dark all at once.
Monitoring isn’t optional
If you can’t see it, you can’t trust it. I put eyes on what matters so problems surface before your customers find them.
AI needs grounding in reality
AI is a tool, not a promise. It earns its place when it’s connected to real data and measured honestly, or it doesn’t go in.
Let’s make something real
If something’s broken, outdated, or nobody owns it, tell me what’s going wrong and I’ll tell you what it takes to fix it.