The early years

It started as O.L. Studios in February 2008, a one-person freelance practice doing exactly what small businesses actually needed rather than what looked good in a portfolio. Fourteen website projects across that stretch, from wedding planners to tattoo shops, each one built from nothing: strategy, design, copy, SEO, the whole thing, then handed off before moving to the next one.

None of these sites are still live. That's not a knock on the work, it's just what happens to small-business websites over a decade: the businesses close, get sold, or move on to something newer. What's left is the Wayback Machine and the memory of building them. Five are worth naming, because together they show the range that eventually became the multi-market systems work at First Community Credit Union and Think Bright Marketing.

ThePerfectPlan.com — a Houston wedding planner, built in WordPress.

Olstudios.com — my own practice's site, hand-coded, the one project with no client to answer to.

PomegranateGroup.com — a web-build side business run with Cesar, a friend who'd go on to build Symphony Advertising into a real agency. This is where that working relationship started, years before either of us had a company that looked like anything.

ImagineThatco.com — a Houston event planner and party-rental company, hand-coded.

ArtOfficialInk.com — a Houston tattoo shop, built in WordPress.

Different verticals, different platforms, same job every time: figure out what the business actually needed online, then build it. That instinct, get to the real problem before touching a tool, is the same one that later drove the lifecycle email architecture at First Community Credit Union and the localization system at Think Bright. The scale changed. The way of working didn't.