Mike Ellis

I’m Mike Ellis. I’m co-founder (together with my wife Rachel) of Thirty8 Digital. We focus on creative digital consultancy: in other words, advising people (almost all of them museums) how to build and grow content-rich, compelling web presences.

Sometimes this means we’re brought in to advise on how to do digital better, and sometimes it means we build things to make digital better. As well as a whole bunch of websites for clients, we also make other things including https://cultureobject.co.uk (a plugin to help museums get their collections on the web), https://trainingdigital.co.uk (a series of worksheets and courses to help people do content better), http://wpformuseums.com (a place for people using WordPress in a museum setting)…and a few others.

We’ve been running Thirty8 Digital since 2011 and have worked lots of great people, including the National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, Britten-Pears Foundation, RAMM, Birmingham Museums, Bristol Museums, Culture24, The Freud Museum…

Prior to this I worked for non-profit Eduserv, where I helped government and university clients with their digital processes, and from 2000-2007 I was Head of Web at The Science Museum. Before that I worked at Waterstone’s Online. Before that I ran a tremendously embarrassing web design company where we spent a lot of time making terrible animated logos…

I’ve written some things about cultural digital – blog posts for Eventbrite, a module or two for University of Leicester Digital Heritage MA when I was Associate Tutor and a snappily titled book: Managing and Growing a Cultural Heritage Web Presence, which was published in April 2011.

I live on the North Cornwall coast, which is amazing until I have to travel anywhere – we have the dubious honour of being one of the furthest centres of population from a train station…