Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Palmatier.
Kelly, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
The year was 1999, and I’d worked for Delta Air Lines for ten years. I had even built the first ever intranet website for the In-Flight Service department. Then, I got offered a job for a much higher salary, working for a computer services company in central Georgia. Unfortunately, that job turned out to be too good to be true, and within six weeks, the company couldn’t pay me. I floundered a bit, searching for non-existent tech jobs on the south side of the city, where I lived at the time. I knew I’d always wanted to be my own boss; I just hadn’t felt ready. However, with no income, I decided I didn’t have anything to lose. I started my new web design firm on January 1, 2000.
I printed up flyers and took them around to local businesses, and I contracted with a local bank to offer websites to their customers. Within six months, I had enough business that my husband was able to quit his job as a purchasing manager in Atlanta and come work from home with me.
Eventually, we started offering more services than just web design, such as hosting, search engine optimization (SEO), social media management, and other marketing services.
In 2012, we opened our Atlanta office. Then, in 2014, we opened a second office in Asheville, North Carolina, near family.
We have since grown to have ten team members. We are a green company, with wind-powered hosting, paperless billing, and a telecommuting staff. We also donate 10% of every home page to an animal rescue group called Brother Wolf.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Running a small business can be full of challenges. Of course, our income was initially limited to how many new websites I could sell. If we had a slow month, it was hard to make ends meet. As we expanded our offerings, we began providing services that brought in regular cash flow, such as hosting, website updates, SEO and managing our customers’ social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. Offering these services helped our clients with their marketing needs while helping smooth out the rough edges of our cash flow.
Please tell us about Griffin Web Design & Marketing.
One thing that sets us apart is our ethics. In our 19 years in business, we have established a solid reputation for professional, reliable, and ethical service. We have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, and we’re extremely transparent with our business practices. For example, we have easy-to-read terms of service, and a link to this document is on every page of our site.
It’s also unusual that we specialize in 100% custom designs, and we include unlimited design revisions. These days, it’s the industry standard to create designs that are responsive, meaning they will respond to the size of the screen on which they’re displayed – effectively creating a desktop version and a mobile version in one site. However, if you’re a perfectionist, responsive designs are much harder to build than fixed-width designs, because you have to test them in every monitor resolution in different browsers on various devices. For this reason, most web design firms these days start off with templates that are pre-built. They customize just a few elements and call it a custom site. We’re different in that we start completely from scratch with a graphic mockup. This means you have any look you want, regardless of how unusual the layout. We also allow unlimited design revisions during the mockup phase, so you’re guaranteed you’ll love the look of the site.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
One of my favorite memories from my childhood was around 1978. My family lived in a little house near Bobby Jones Golf Course, and my brother and I decided to put on a little neighborhood carnival. We set up our backyard with activities and games to play, and we invited all the neighbors to participate. We offered it as a fundraiser, and we ended up raising $42 for the Atlanta Humane Society. As a child, that $42 felt like I had raised a fortune for a good cause!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://griffinwebdesign.com/
- Phone: 770-467-0050
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/griffinweb/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/griffinweb/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/griffinweb
Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
