It all started in my sports marketing class during my senior year at Lake Norman High School. It was the final semester, which is usually a time for seniors to chill out before college. I was just accepted into college and about to begin my last ever baseball season, so my focus was not on school and certainly not an elective course. That all changed when I was placed into a sports marketing class, which ended up inspiring me to create a website development company out of my college dorm room.
A Class Project That Inspired Me
At the end of the semester our teacher Tony Paciotti assigned us a project. We were to create a sports franchise and present it to the class. This included marketing materials and budgeting. I am not a fan of numbers, so I opted to do the marketing stuff which involved creation of a website through Wix. Mr. Paciotti even showed us a demo on how to build the website. It immediately sparked my interest. I never knew that creating a website was possible for a high school student with no knowledge of code. This was the first time I had ever seen something like that. The project ended up being one of my favorites ever. I will never forget that class.
Taking Those Skills to the Next Level
After building that website in class, I had the itch to do more. When I arrived in my freshman dorms at UNC Wilmington, I decided to purchase a Macbook Pro 13 inch for school work and website projects. I started out building a few sites for fun and named the company Seahawk Media. When a buddy across the hall caught wind of my work he asked me to build a website for a non-profit he was chairman which happened to be endorsed by Michelle Obama. The demand for my services started to grow.
Shortly after I realized the website I built was not optimized for mobile and the Wix had limited integrations. I started researching what big brands were using for their web platform and content distribution, which led me to WordPress.
I read hundreds of articles and watched many videos. Practiced on many demo sites. After I felt confident using WordPress, I was able to upgrade all the Wix sites I had built to WordPress. I used GoDaddy to manage all of this. It elevated my game and took Seahawk to the next level.
Delighting Our Customers One Website at a Time
My first few website launches were successful, which gave me the confidence I needed going forward. Of course there were some bumps and bruises along the way, but that’s normal for every business. I was fortunate enough to join the GoDaddy Pro Partner program from beta, which has prevented many issues that many website developers normally face. I chose to use Managed WordPress Hosting through GoDaddy on all my client websites because it has proven to be the fastest and most reliable for WordPress sites.
Now it is our goal to continuously delight our customers one website at a time. As we grow and manage more websites, it is also our mission to keep that family vibe, close support that many small business owners are desperately searching for in a marketing partner.
