Freelance web developer · Belfast 54.597° N 5.930° W
I'm Jonathan Finlay, a freelance developer with eleven years of agency experience. I build React and Next.js apps, Laravel platforms and WordPress sites that are fast, accessible and easy to run, and I can support them with a monthly plan once they're live.
Selected work
Client names are left out on purpose. Each project is described by sector, with figures from the delivered work.
Case 01 · Internal product · Creative agency
Years of proposals, case studies and know-how were scattered across folders and inboxes. Now staff ask a question in Claude and get an answer drawn from more than 5,000 company notes, each cited back to its source so they can check it. Looking things up never gives anyone the power to change them, nothing is edited without a person approving it, and every note is labelled for what can be shared outside the business.
Case 02 · Technical lead · National screen agency
Around 6,000 films, some dating back to the early 1900s, now live on the same platform as the agency's main website, so the public can find the archive alongside everything else the agency does. I led it from the first requirements workshop to handover: showing the client the working system at every stage, raising constraints before designs were signed off, and writing the statement of work and the documentation their team runs it from.
Case 03 · Long-running client · UK fintech
Millions of people in the UK have money they have lost track of. This service finds it: forgotten pensions, old bank accounts, shares and Child Trust Funds. People sign up, verify who they are, and the service searches banks, pension and investment providers on their behalf. Its industry campaign with major banks and pension providers returned around £2.5bn in lost assets to UK consumers in the first half of 2026. I've built and looked after the public site, the member portal and the operations team's tools for several years, across two agencies.
Services
Web apps, customer portals, dashboards and fast marketing front ends. New builds, or picking up an existing codebase that needs features, fixes or a clean-up.
Bespoke platforms, booking and ordering systems, admin tools and APIs that connect to the services you already use.
Brochure sites with custom themes and blocks your team can edit without breaking the layout. Built to load quickly and meet WCAG accessibility standards.
A monthly plan covering updates, security patches, backups and uptime checks, with development days set aside for fixes and changes as your site grows.
Connect Claude to your own documents and systems: knowledge bases that cite their sources, and workflows that keep a person in charge of every change.
Moving sites onto Cloudflare, speeding up slow pages, and accessibility audits with a clear list of what to fix first.
Approach
We work through what the site must do, who uses it and what it has to connect to. Technical constraints come up here, before design is signed off.
Scope, milestones and price written down in plain language, so we both know what done looks like.
You see the working system at every stage, not just at launch. Every release goes through automated tests, performance checks and accessibility scans.
Launch, training for your team and handover documentation. After that, a support plan with development days keeps the site updated, secure and improving.
About
I've been building for the web since 2014, starting as a junior developer at a Belfast agency and working up to lead application developer, then web development lead. Along the way I've built bespoke platforms, native and hybrid mobile apps, learning platforms and corporate sites.
Now I lead technical direction, release quality and accessibility across web work, and I build AI platforms with MCP servers and agent workflows. I run several coding agents in parallel on separate issues, which means a small studio can move at the pace of a larger team.
BSc (Hons) Computing Science, Ulster University · Belfast, Northern Ireland
Contact
Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll reply within two working days.