Summary
AI Paul
Louise Towler’s fascination with science began unusually early. A precocious reader, she devoured books about scientists such as Marie Curie and Charles Darwin and grew up assuming that becoming a scientist was perfectly natural for a girl. Her curiosity extended to encyclopedias, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and eventually five A-level subjects – despite teachers warning that she was taking on too much. She ultimately earned top grades and studied mathematics at Durham University after missing out on Oxford, an experience that reinforced her willingness to follow her own instincts rather than other people’s expectations.
That independent streak also shaped Towler’s career. Although mathematics graduates like her were often steered toward actuarial work or accounting, she instead took a job developing scientific software after teaching herself programming and learning languages including BASIC and Fortran. Years later, while living in Washington, D.C., where her husband had been posted as a British trade secretary, she became a stay-at-home mother. On Christmas Day 2000, armed with an HTML book her husband had given her, she sat down at the family computer and began teaching herself how to build websites – a decision that eventually redirected her professional life.
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Towler remembers the family’s nearly four years in Washington as an important period, both personally and professionally. She enjoyed having time with her two young sons, exploring museums and American history with them, traveling around the United States, and adapting to life in America. The conversation also wanders into her views on Britain, Europe, the royal family, and Brexit. Towler describes herself as decidedly not a royalist, although she recognizes the monarchy’s international value, and she remains deeply disappointed by Brexit. For her, the referendum also demonstrated a broader lesson: people are much easier to persuade with a positive vision than by simply warning them about negative consequences.
WordPress entered Towler’s life almost accidentally. After selling a small HTML website around 2011, a client asked whether she could build it in WordPress instead. She agreed, went home, searched for how to build a WordPress website, and taught herself. What began as a solo operation gradually became an agency with a team of engineers, about 220 hosted WordPress clients, and roughly a dozen websites in development at any given time. A particularly important part of the business has been recurring retainers, which Towler began offering almost instinctively in her earliest days. Today, about half of the agency’s revenue comes from retainers, giving it long-term relationships with clients that sometimes stretch a decade or more.
Underlying her story is a philosophy built around curiosity, continuous learning, and careful planning. She values people for their willingness to learn rather than their formal qualifications, and she applies the same attitude to running her agency. When something goes wrong, her instinct is to examine the process and determine how to prevent it from happening again. Her guiding principle is to “slow down to speed up” – spending more time planning before beginning the work. That same combination of technology and larger purpose appears in her interest in digital sustainability: she has spoken about measuring websites’ carbon footprints and is working toward a plugin intended to make environmentally responsible websites commercially beneficial as well.