Cary, NC – Today, we take the bubble wrap off the new website. CitizenWebsites (CW, for short) is born – a new place to showcase the website development work of Goodtree & Co., Inc.

The Journey of a Digital Immigrant

My first computer was a giant DECmate at Benton & Bowles in the mid-1980′s. I developed a database of commercial directors.

In the early 1990′s, I had an Amiga at home and an Apple Classic II at work. In 1995, I got my first laptop, a Powerbook 500.

I learned FileMaker and published a program called Directors Review, with hundreds of subscribers in the advertising production industry.

In 2000, I had a small hand in the launch of NFL.com. I was on staff that football season as the senior producer for television advertising, working under Executive Producer Henry Frenzel and Creative Director Bob Stohrer.

After that, I started to learn HTML, and build simple websites with programs like Trellix. In 2006, I retired from television to devote myself fully to a career as an internet copywriter.

I spent a year at Brooks Bell Interactive, tightening up my HTML, CSS and learning Dreamweaver. I got to write for great clients including AARP, Nickelodeon and Consumer Reports.

In 2007, I went back on my own with a big website project for a large medical practice in South Carolina.

I was still on my laptop, now a PowerBook G4.

In 2008, Goodtree & Company, Inc. was born. One of our first big projects was a massive sight for the development in Raleigh called North Hills. It’s like a city within the city, and we got to do cool stuff including interactive maps, lots of photography and content creation. It set the tone for all our future projects.

2009 saw the launch of CaryCitizen. For the first time, we built a property for ourselves – a hyperlocal news source about Cary, NC. It’s a town of 147,000 with a failing newspaper and a crying need for community news. Since then, we’ve grown circulation to over 60,000 a month, won a Knight Foundation Fellowship and got listed in the Columbia Journalism Review. We manage our own closed advertising space and it does pretty well, thank you.

Soon, lots of businesses and organizations were asking us to do their websites. From a branding perspective, it became pretty overwhelming to manage from either CaryCitizen or Goodtree & Company. Thus, CitizenWebsites was born.

Why It’s Called CitizenWebsites

As a TV Producer, I worked for national brands including P&G, Woolrich, The New York Times and GM. Now I work for local businesses.

Most have fewer than 100 employees. Everybody knows the boss. From landscapers to world-class developers, my clients are ordinary citizens. They’re not going to Davos or Cannes.

But they are the engines of the future, local powerhouses in a dynamic region that deserve the best branding and marketing, today.

I could still make television commercials. But that’s looking backward. CW is the next step forward. I write this from an Intel iMac.

I’m going to have a lot to talk about.

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