business backgrounder | industry
to a job as the school’s technology coordinator, a role that
allowed him to teach computer skills to all grade levels.
Eventually, Forth was recruited by a California company
to develop some of the first online learning tools, a job that
matched his résumé well. He was an educator who also knew
how to code. It was a big jump to leave teaching, but it proved
to be a good move even though the company would later lay
him off.
In 2001, SiteCrafting was incorporated and web design
became Forth’s full-time job. In the beginning, SiteCrafting
took jobs that the bigger web design firms weren’t interested
in, but the collapase of the dot-com bubble in 2000 wiped out
many of those firms, leaving SiteCrafting poised for growth.
Still, the company has grown far beyond Forth’s initial
dreams.
“I thought if we had five or six of us it would be pretty
awesome,” Forth said.
trusted guide
Plenty has changed in the nearly two decades since Forth and
his band of Techsperts began building websites.
“I became the trusted person who would go
to their law firm and fix their printer or build a
website for them.”
— Brian Forth
There isn’t much debate anymore about whether students —
or businesses — should be on the Internet.
Web design is much more sophisticated. (Remember
Geocities?)
And a whole new world of social media has emerged,
leading businesses that once grappled with whether and how
to establish a web presence to wrestle with how and whether
to use social services like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and
Pinterest.
But in one respect, at least, the Internet has come full
circle: Forth said the rise of the mobile web has brought back
a feeling of the Wild West.
Two years ago, he was telling everyone they needed mobile
websites. The rapid growth in the smartphone and tablet
Brian Forth, president of the Tacoma-based web design and development firm SiteCrafting, attributes his company’s success to his insistence that it
provides a service rather than a product.
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