Do You Need A Website?

TLDR; Yes you need a website, and we just redid ours! Check it out! https://silverpine.com

Many years ago when Ryan and I were bootstrapping Silverpine, we ran very lean. I’m talking bare-bones lean. Some would say that we ran on a shoestring budget, but quite honestly, I doubt we would have justified the purchase of a shoestring at that point.

During that period, we were starting to develop our client base and define who we were as a company, and we didn’t give much thought to our website. At that point, if I remember correctly, we hadn’t acquired the silverpine.com domain, and we only had silverpinesoftware.com. The site was comprised of a single web page that said “SILVERPINE SOFTWARE” and it had a mailto link at the bottom (for anyone that was so impressed by our invisibility that they might want to contact us.) Our focus was on mobile development at that point, so we figured that it didn’t really matter if we had a web presence.

However, our clients noticed. I clearly remember receiving a phone call from our primary contact at Very-Large-Corp. We had just signed a contract with them to do some work and had jumped through the hoops to get Silverpine into Very-Large-Corp‘s invoicing system. He called me because he was very concerned that if our invoices showed up on reports it might prompt people to investigate us a bit. If they wanted to know more about us, they surely would go look at our website. If they looked at our website, they would question whether we were an actual company. This could potentially raise some red flags with people within Very-Large-Corp and cause him (and us) trouble. I remember his words very clearly: “I need you to put up a real website as soon as possible.“

So, I spent that weekend creating a very bland website that was mostly populated with stock images. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t amazing. But it was a real website. We were somehow legitimate at that point.

However, time marches on and as it does, websites age and look crustier and more stale with every passing day. To that end, we decided that in 2020, we would give silverpine.com a facelift and in the process better showcase who we are and what we do. Conceptually, Silverpine embodies something that is clean, sleek and entirely complementary. The design of the website is intended to demonstrate this visually and show how a variety of strikingly different designs all work with Silverpine. The intention is that we enhance and improve existing brands and products and hopefully it’s now clear, visually, how we do that.

What we have today is amazing and I love it, but it’s also just the start. While we very often cannot talk publicly about many of the products we work on, we can add more content that continues to explain and expand on what we are and how we do it. The new website design provides a framework and a roadmap for adding and enhancing this. I’m extremely excited to grow the content so keep checking back from time to time, and if you haven’t already, go take a look!

Oh and if you wanted the answer to my question? Yes, you need a website.