First Website, First Clients

Seahawk’s story starts in a high school classroom.

The first website

At the end of his senior year, Ryan James’s sports marketing teacher, Tony Paciotti, gave the class one last project: build a sports franchise from the ground up, complete with a website, marketing materials and a budget.

For the website, Mr. Paciotti showed the class Wix. Builders like Wix and Squarespace were just starting to make the web approachable for everyone, and for Ryan it was a revelation. He had never imagined that a high school student who didn’t know HTML or CSS could put a real website online.

The first clients

After high school, Ryan headed to UNC Wilmington in North Carolina, and turned that class project into a practice. From his dorm room he started Seahawk Media Group, building websites for local businesses around Wilmington under the first seahawk mark: a green bird on a blue square.

December 5, 2015 · The first capture

On December 5, 2015, the Internet Archive captured seahawkmediagroup.com for the first time. By then the site was live and taking clients. Ryan was listed as President, Founder and Lead Developer, and beside him was Jake Geller, his best friend from high school and his college roommate. Jake had been building HTML websites since he was 12, and his first business ever was a web design shop of his own, World of Web Designs. Together they built modern sites for local businesses and nonprofits, with a four-step process: a phone consultation, a free sample template, a free estimate, then design.

The site also introduced a crew of UNCW students. In practice the crew was Ryan and Jake, but the plan was bigger. Facebook had spread one university at a time, and Ryan thought a web practice could too: a local crew at every college in the country, each branded to its school.

See the original site on the Wayback Machine ↗

A crew of two

Jake comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and he already had ventures of his own: a phone screen repair business for local college students, and an app that was meant to be Uber for college laundry. Ryan built the app’s site and took on its marketing. The laundry app failed miserably, but it pushed Ryan to grow the web practice.

Jake was key to landing the first customers, around town and through Craigslist. Among them:

• A website for an established nonprofit, for a college friend from across the hall.
• A local hair salon Ryan found on Craigslist.
• A saltwater fish store and a Japanese restaurant, both brought in by Jake.
• A vending machine business, also found on Craigslist. Ryan and Jake met the owner at a McDonald’s an hour or two from campus, closed the deal for $400 and delivered the site.

The phone call

The saltwater fish store was really two stores back in their hometown. Jake knew them well. He had kept a saltwater tank and bought from them, and back in his World of Web Designs days he had built the stores an HTML site, long since outdated, in exchange for a break on his tank and supplies, which don’t come cheap.

The project went through round after round of revisions. The owner was happy one day and angry the next, and impossible to please. Then one day he called while Ryan and Jake were in their dorm room. Jake was the front man on the project, so he took the call, on speaker. The owner started shouting because the site’s SMTP email wasn’t working, a problem neither of them had seen before. It was a scary, shocking call, and Jake handled it as well as anyone could.

They delivered the project. But that call is where they saw how upset a client gets when something on their site breaks, and how much opportunity there is in WordPress maintenance.

An auction site, and a $300 lesson

Ryan and Jake also planned an auction site as a separate venture, and found Wix couldn’t do it. They bought the domain through GoDaddy along with Managed WordPress hosting, which is how Ryan later found GoDaddy Pro. A plugin called Ultimate Auction Pro got the site working. The auction business failed miserably too.

Along the way Ryan found WordPress.com. He already had WordPress hosting with GoDaddy, but he was new to WordPress, and with Jetpack and the other line items in the plan, he was sure he needed it alongside his hosting. He bought a $300 annual plan. Jake tried to talk him out of it, since they already had hosting. To this day it is a running joke: Jake still reminds Ryan that he told him not to buy that plan.

On April 12, 2016, Seahawk Media Group joined GoDaddy Pro, the date Seahawk counts as its unofficial founding.

P.S. For anyone just starting out: WordPress.org is the free software you install on your own hosting, and WordPress.com is a hosted service that sells plans to run it for you. The two are three letters apart and, for Ryan, $300 apart. He would go on to build a company on WordPress, but first he paid for the same website twice, and Jake has never let him forget it.