We’re a Pacific Northwest boutique family business owned by Alex and Barbara Blake (son and mom). Here’s a bit of our background and story…
He loves tech; she loves art
Two very different passions blended together.
Alex’s love for technology began at age 10 after receiving a computer as a gift from his tech-savvy uncle. He soon started taking them apart and tweaking them, eventually becoming a staunch advocate for open-source software, Linux, and digital freedom.
Barbara, on the other hand, had loved creating arts and crafts since youth. She studied design and Business English in college, unaware those skills would one day allow her to craft beautiful sites. For her, the web was a new and exciting medium for artistic expression.
The start of Cba Sites
With years of experience in computer systems and the arts, building websites seemed a natural step. In 2011 while in high school, Alex began building a Wix website for our local church and asked Barbara for assistance with the design. It was fun to build, but the limited control was frustrating. Alex found WordPress would give us more control over the design, and we built a site to support a missionary going to the Philippines. As people liked our work and we received more requests, we saw an opportunity to help folks with work we love. After prayer for the name, Cba Sites was born in April 2103.
Barbara kept seeing websites that were a maddening mess and a struggle to use, and our first goal was to create ones that were more visitor-friendly and clearly-organized. We then worked hard to creatively capture the feel of each organization into the website as clearly as possible, something our clients loved.
Bots, security, and speed
In early 2105 a bot attack blocked login entry to our own WordPress site, causing both fear and the realization that site security was a real need. A few months later while on vacation, we received a call to rescue a business by finishing their website in time for Adrian Grenier and the Lonely Whale Foundation’s business call with them…3 days later. Their dev tech had suddenly dropped the project, and it was built in WordPress.
Between it’s critical vulnerabilities and the development page refreshes taking 5-10 seconds apiece, we knew there was no way we could finish the site in time while using WordPress. Alex researched and found Grav, a flat-file CMS that eliminates the need for a database setup and was far faster than any WordPress site we’d seen. He coded for 3 days straight while Barbara entered content, and the business landed their new client. We never looked back.
In 2017, we took a leap and planned to move from Washington, but to where, we wondered. After a road trip through three states, we fell in love with the people and community in the winsome town of Roseburg, Oregon, and we’ve called it home ever since.
The quest for a better website
Website technology keeps evolving with the promise of better sites in terms of security, stability, and speed. Following the quest, over the years we’ve invested thousands of hours researching technology and have built sites in frameworks and static site generators such as Flask, Ruby on Rails, Middleman, Jekyll, SvelteKit, and Shadcn. Alex even began work building his own custom framework in order to deliver the fast, quality sites he envisioned. We recently found that Astro has grown significantly and offers the lightweight code speed we’ve been craving, as well as making their code even more secure from the growing hacker industry.
From digital brochures to business tools
Websites design has also changed drastically since our early days, and we continually research to keep pace with it. Seeing that websites are becoming tools that align with organizational growth goals much more powerfully than ever before, we knew that was the next step of growth for us. This time the research included business and marketing principles on top of new website design strategies. The learning never stops for us.
He sees structure; she sees content
One surprising thing we learned through the years is that we both see websites completely differently. Not intentionally; just how our brain works.
At first glance at a site, Alex sees the structure. That means he sees the boxes, the divs, the columns, the rows, the margins and padding, the alignment, the spacing, and the white space or lack of it.
For Barbara, she immediately sees the content. The text and the words, the meanings, the story, the pictures, the icons, the path to follow or lack of it, the organization or lack of it, and all the clutter that gets in the way of understanding and enjoying the site.
To be honest, before we understood this, it caused more than a few differences on how to build sites, the “best result,” and the decisions we would make. In spite of the clashes, our best work was often when worked together and blended our visions on the same project. As we gradually understood our differences, we began to stop resisting them. We realized that our different brains complement each other and allow us to see sites holistically. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful in making sites that work very effectively, even though it took us years to recognize why.
You, the client, are worth it all
We also recognize (sometimes painfully) that building sites from scratch or from frameworks makes our work much more difficult than other build processes, including the need to constantly keep abreast of the technological changes and updates. Nonetheless, we believe that integrity and good business practice means doing things the right way that’s best for our clients, even if it is harder. We stand firm on that, knowing that you are worth all the effort.