I built my first website in 1995. I was a teenager, the internet ran over a phone line that shrieked at you before it connected, and nobody involved had any real idea what the web would become. That hobby turned into Metserve Media, and thirty-one years later it’s still running, quietly, alongside everything else I’ve done since.
That’s actually the problem I want to fix with this post. If you’ve read this blog before, you’ve heard plenty about CCTV Aware, about the Met, about the website redesign, even about my summer holidays. Metserve, the business that’s actually been running the longest out of all of them, barely gets a mention. That’s not because it matters less. It’s because I’ve never been particularly good at talking about the marketing side of what I do, even though it’s arguably the skillset I’ve had the longest.
What’s actually run alongside everything else
Metserve Media has been there through every other chapter. It was running while I took over the family off-licence in Hackney. It was running through all fifteen years I spent as a Met detective, built and maintained in whatever spare time a serious crime caseload leaves you. It’s still running now, alongside CCTV Aware and the two installer directories. Web design, website optimisation, general marketing and bespoke functionality, WordPress, PHP, HTML and CSS, for clients that have included Subway, TDI Plc and Army & Navy stores.
Three decades is a strange amount of time to sit with. I’ve watched the web move from hand-written HTML on dial-up, through the Flash era, through the WordPress-for-everything era, into whatever this current AI-assisted, framework-heavy era counts as. Most of what I actually do hasn’t changed as much as the tools have: understand what a business needs, work out how people are meant to find it, build something that does the job without unnecessary complexity. That’s the same brief it was in 1995, just with better hosting.
Why this is worth saying now
I don’t think I’ve undersold Metserve deliberately. I think it’s just easier to write about the dramatic pivots, leaving the Met, launching two new directories, than it is to write about a business that’s simply been steady and useful for three decades. But steady and useful is genuinely hard to pull off for that long, and I’d rather start giving it proper credit than keep treating it as the quiet one in the background.
If there’s a thread running through CCTV Aware, the installer directories and this website’s own rebuild, it’s the same one that’s been running through Metserve since 1995: build things properly, keep them simple enough to actually maintain, and don’t stop once the initial version is live. Thirty-one years in, that’s still the whole job.