20 Years With BoxCrush: How It Started/How It’s Going
We’ve been crushing it now for 20 years and we thought it would be fun to take a look back at how much things have changed since we first got started.
Not only has website design, development and functionality changed dramatically over the last 20 years, but the range of services BoxCrush offers has evolved tremendously as well. In the earliest years of BoxCrush, what we created for our clients was primarily offline: logos, glossy magazine ads, trifold brochures, trade show literature, and other printed materials. But BoxCrush founder Dan Finney understood that the future of marketing was online, and he began focusing on creating cutting-edge websites to help clients make a statement digitally.
BoxCrush in the early 2000s
Twenty years ago, the “cutting edge” of web design looked a lot different than it does today. For many businesses, a website was simply an online business card: a static site that provided contact information, some branding, and some basic details about the company. A very modern website might have featured glossy buttons, Flash, and mouseover sound effects. It was also during this time that Google took over the search engine scene (anyone remember Ask Jeeves?) and BoxCrush began devising ways to help clients not only launch a website but also improve its ability to be found by potential customers.
This time period is often referred to by marketers as the “Wild, Wild West Era” of search engine optimization (SEO) and essentially involved repeating your keyword 200 times and peppering the internet with links to your site. (Today, these practices will get you blacklisted.)
2004-2008: the Web 2.0 era
The Web 2.0 era of interactive and user-generated content presented us with new challenges and opportunities once again to assist our clients not only in being found online but also in reaching out and engaging with new audiences, and BoxCrush began offering social media management.
It was also during this time that web platforms began to evolve from simple, static sites into dynamic platforms that offered more opportunities to engage and interact. Marketers began to consider not only what they wanted to present to an audience but also how to meet them where they were and to provide an experience that was both useful and delightful.
The 2010s: eCommerce and responsive design
The concept of responsive design also began to develop around this time, acknowledging that users were interacting with websites using various screen sizes and resolutions. In 2015, Google began boosting the page ranking of websites that were optimized for mobile devices, and we began incorporating this consideration into our design and development.
We also signed our first eCommerce clients and we began building platforms that enabled a seamless online shopping experience from product selection to checkout and order confirmation.
2015-2020: Digital marketing and content strategy
Meanwhile, we continued to develop and hone our digital marketing services, offering digital advertising management coupled with more sophisticated and robust search engine optimization strategies to offer clients both paid and organic options for increasing their websites’ visibility.
BoxCrush also added email marketing and automation to our repertoire and began helping our clients track important metrics to help guide their marketing strategy.
The 2020s and beyond
In our 20th year, BoxCrush has evolved into an agency capable of high-level functionality for custom application development, third-party database and eCommerce integration, ensuring privacy, HIPAA compliance, and accessibility, and we provide concierge-level managed hosting to ensure our clients never go offline. We have added staff dedicated to digital advertising, social media management, SEO and content development, and email marketing and automation to become a truly full-service design, development, and digital marketing agency. We can’t wait to discover what the next 20 years will bring, and you’re invited.