We’re a Pacific Northwest boutique family web development business owned by Alex Blake and Barbara Blake (son and mom). Here’s a bit of our background and story…
Our Roots
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 proponent for open-source software, Linux, and digital freedom.
Barbara, on the other hand, loved creating arts and crafts since her youth. She studied design and Business English in college, unaware those skills would one day allow her to craft beautiful websites. 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, but the limited control was frustrating. Alex discovered that WordPress offered more design freedom, and together we built a site to support a missionary headed to the Philippines. As people liked our work and requests grew, we saw an opportunity to help others with work we loved. After praying about the name, Cba Sites was born in April 2013.
Barbara noticed many websites were disorganized and a struggle to use, and our first goal was to create more visitor-friendly sites with clear layouts. We worked hard to creatively capture the unique feel and strengths of each organization into their website, helping to promote their growth. Our clients loved it.
Bots, Security, and Speed
In early 2015 a bot-attack blocked login access to our own WordPress site, sparking both fear and a realization: site security was a critical need. A few months later while on vacation, we received a call to rescue a business. They needed their website finished in time for a call with Adrian Grenier and the Lonely Whale Foundation…in just 3 days. Their developer had suddenly dropped the project, and it was built in WordPress.
Faced with a WordPress page refresh time of 5-10 seconds per edit, we knew we couldn’t meet the deadline using it. 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. Grav also proved to be significantly more secure. Alex coded the new site for 3 days straight while Barbara entered the content, and the business landed their new client. We never looked back.
In 2017, we took a leap and planned to move from Washington to somewhere south. 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, promising better security, stability, and speed. Following that quest, over the years we’ve invested thousands of hours researching technology. We’ve built sites using frameworks and static site generators such as Grav, Flask, Ruby on Rails, Middleman, Jekyll, SvelteKit, and Astro. Alex even began work building his own custom UI library to deliver the fast, quality sites he envisioned. However, after learning that Astro offers best-in-class performance and the lightweight speed we’ve been craving, along with a growing set of developer tools, we’ve made it our primary framework.
From Digital Brochures to Business Tools
Website design has also changed drastically since our early days, and we continually study to keep pace. Recognizing that websites are becoming powerful tools that align with organizational growth goals more effectively than ever before, we knew that was our next step. This time, the study included business and marketing principles.
Structure vs Content
One surprising thing we learned through the years is that we both see websites completely differently. Not intentionally; it’s just how our brains works.
At first glance at a site, Alex sees the structure: the boxes, divs, columns, rows, margins and padding, alignment, spacing, and the white space or lack of it.
For Barbara, she immediately sees the content: the text, words, meanings, story, pictures, icons, the visitor path (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 and what constituted the “best result.” In spite of those clashes, our best work bloomed when we worked together and blended our visions on the same project. As we gradually understood our differences, we began to realize our brains complement each other, allowing us to see sites holistically. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful in creating sites that work so effectively.
Looking Ahead: SaaS and Team Growth
We’re actively growing our business to specialize in building websites for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies. Having used and loved so many of these tools over the years, we realized that serving them is a perfect fit for our experience. It’s also a way to give back to the community, especially the open-source community, that has supported us.
We’re now leveraging the Astro framework and are excited to be part of its fast-growing development community. To support our own expansion, we are in the process of adding another designer and a back-end developer to our team.
You, the Client, are Worth It
So yeah, we tend to be perfectionists and routinely put more time into a site than we bill for. We’ve never rushed a client through a “website mill” process; every project holds to the same standard regardless of budget. We staunchly refuse to sell sites built with inferior tools, so our process takes more work. 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 do it anyway, though, because our clients deserve the best.