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Swarm ICT is one person
My name is Oliver Porter. Most people call me Olly. I build websites for small businesses and I help people in later life get on with their technology.
How this happened
Two halves of a job that turn out to fit together
The clinic came first. For nine years I’ve been the technology person at Wadswick Green in Corsham, two hours every Friday morning in the restaurant, for anyone who wants to bring something down.
The websites run alongside it. I have been building those for over ten years, more than a hundred now, over fifty of them for therapists and practitioners, and I put the whole lot under the Swarm ICT name in 2020. These days Rangeford Villages pay for the Friday session as a resident amenity.
Nine years of Fridays has quietly changed how I do everything else. When you spend every week watching people in their eighties try to use things designed by people in their twenties, you stop building websites the way agencies build them. You learn what font size actually gets read, and which words send someone straight back to the previous page.
So that’s the business now. Websites on one side, technology help for people in later life on the other, and a fair amount of useful traffic between the two. Quietly underneath both, I still run the IT for a handful of businesses, including a regulated financial services firm I have looked after for seven years.
Oliver Porter
Founder, and the only person you’ll ever deal with.
- 10+ years and 100+ websites built
- 50+ of them for therapists and practitioners
- Nine years at Wadswick Green, Corsham
- Seven years running IT for a regulated financial services firm
- Trading as Swarm ICT since 2020
- 6 to 12 residents helped every week, plus remote support
- Based in Corsham, Wiltshire and Burnham, Berkshire
- Available seven days a week
As featured in
How I work
Six things I actually stick to
No jargon. Ever.
If I use a word you don’t know, I’ve failed, not you. Everything gets explained in language you could repeat to somebody else, which is the real test of whether it was explained at all.
You get me
The person who quotes you is the person who does the work and the person who answers the phone in two years. Nothing is subcontracted to somebody you’ve never spoken to.
The price is the price
Agreed before anything starts, in writing, and it doesn’t creep. If the job turns out to be bigger than we thought, that’s a conversation, not an invoice.
I’ll tell you not to spend
Plenty of problems have a free answer or don’t need solving at all. You’ll hear about those too, even when it costs me the work.
Teaching, not just fixing
Fixing it is half the job. Making sure you could handle it yourself next time is the other half, and it’s the half people remember.
Honest about limits
If something is outside what I do well, or you’ve outgrown a one-person business, I’ll say so plainly and point you at someone better.
Building a website
The six-stage process
Nobody enjoys a project where they don’t know what’s happening. Here’s exactly what happens, in order.
01
Discover
We talk about your business, your customers and what you actually want more of. I look at your competitors and where the gaps are.
02
Define
We agree the pages, the features and what success looks like. You get a fixed price and a timeline before anything begins.
03
Design
I design the look and layout and show you. We go round until you genuinely like it, not until you give up objecting.
04
Develop
The build: pages, bookings, payments, forms, mobile layouts, speed. Tested on real phones rather than a resized browser.
05
Deploy
Going live, carefully. Domain, email, SSL, redirects from the old site, search engines told properly. Nothing left half-done.
06
Dedicated support
Updates, backups, security and changes. When you need something altering you ring the person who built it.
9
Years at Wadswick Green
6 to 12
Residents helped weekly
2,000+
Visits and repairs
7
Days a week available
What people say
Both halves of the job
Rated 5 out of 5
“Having Ollie here is a necessity, so many of us depend on him, we simply wouldn’t manage without him!”
Judy Harriman, 85
Resident, Wadswick Green
As told to Care Talk, November 2023
Rated 5 out of 5
“When people like us move into the village, they typically get smart TVs and sound systems and without his help, it would be impossible to use them.”
Michael Harriman, 81
Resident, Wadswick Green
As told to Care Talk, November 2023
Rated 5 out of 5
“Dealing with Olly from the start has been easy, simple and painless. A great website at a fantastic cost with superb ongoing support.”
J.W.
Web design client
“I am always extremely excited when a resident comes down and has a bright smile on their face, telling me that I managed to fix this all by myself.”
Oliver Porter, speaking to Care Talk, November 2023
That’s the whole thing, really. The aim was never to make people dependent on me. It was to make them not need me. Fortunately there is always something else round the corner, so I’ve never yet worked myself out of a job.
Where I am
Two bases, one phone number
Corsham in Wiltshire and Burnham in Berkshire. I split my time between them, so both areas get proper coverage rather than occasional visits.
Websites I build for anyone, anywhere in the UK, several of my clients I’ve never met in person. Tech visits and clinics are naturally more local, though I travel further than most people expect.
Ring me. You’ll get me.
Not a switchboard, not a form that goes nowhere, and not somebody reading a script.