Jem Turner named finalist for Best Businesswoman in Business Services 2026

The Best Businesswomen Awards – the UK’s biggest celebration of women in business since 2015 – have released the names of their 2026 finalists, and I’ve been selected as a finalist in the Best Businesswoman in Business Services category.

I found WordPress back when it was still on version 1.0 and started building websites commercially on version 1.5, released in 2005. Twenty years later I’m still doing it. Not because I planned a career in web development back then; nobody was planning a career in web development in the late 90s, especially not a teenage girl… but because I got curious about something, then annoyed about something, and kept going. That’s more or less still how I work today.

Self-taught, self-supported, and for a long stretch of it, self-employed in the most literal sense: freelancing was how I paid the bills and looked after my kids as a single parent. This site still ranks for competitive terms like “wordpress developer UK” from years of consistent work rather than anything I’ve spent money on boosting, which tells you everything you need to know about how I approach marketing (badly, pretty much on purpose, because I’d rather the work speak for itself).

My approach to that work has been recognised beyond just client referrals, with coverage in The Register and WP Tavern, and cybersecurity research recognised by Wordfence, an authority on WordPress security. Nowadays I can mostly be found running my specialist WordPress dev agency, Ultimately Better Ltd, but I’m still coding: every single day.

As an openly autistic founder in a male dominated industry regularly battling other peoples’ assumptions just to survive in business, reaching the final stage of the awards process amongst so many other incredible women is a huge privilege and I’m honoured to get here. Category winners are announced at the Best Businesswomen Awards Gala Final in October 2026, and I’ve got my fingers crossed!