What does surfing have to do with web design?

As a surfer living in Texas, one of the most important lessons I eventually learned was to pick the right surfboard for the ever-changing conditions we have here on the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, when I started riding waves in Galveston more than 25 years ago, it was a tough concept to understand.

All the popular magazines at the time showed surfers riding these potato-chip thin shortboards that looked very similar to the ironing board in our family’s laundry room. Of course, as a teenager I had to have the “right” kind of board. It was a surfboard that everyone was supposed to be able to ride. In other words, it was billed as equipment for the masses. That apparently didn’t apply to me. I’d get up on it, struggle to my feet and fight the shifting surf every which way as I tried to figure out how to glide my lanky body effortlessly to the beach while perched atop this tiny piece of fiberglass. Needless to say, my early surfing forays were full of frustration and disappointment.

Thanks to a friend, I eventually figured out that getting on a longer and thicker board made all the difference. The day I rode the bigger board, something clicked. My body was able to do what my mind had been telling it to for several months. I stopped working against the waves and started moving with them. Choosing the right equipment made me a surfer.

A few decades later, when I started Big Kahuna Creative, I realized that there were a lot of companies in the creative services industry that were trying to be all things to all people. Just like that first surfboard of mine, their approach was a perfect-for-the-masses process of developing branding, websites, publications and everything else in between that could be even remotely called marketing. They could do tons of things but they weren’t mastering any of them.

I vowed that BKC would be different. Our only focus is building websites. More specifically, the Kahuna team only builds WordPress sites that can be easily customized to fit the needs of our clientele and can be built in a way that makes them a snap for our clients to update themselves. That’s it: great looking websites that don’t require heavy coding to maintain. That’s all we do.

Over the years, I’ve found that such a focus is really the best way to do business. It helps us as a company to better communicate what it is we do. And it helps our prospective customers quickly determine if we’re the right fit for them. Our approach doesn’t work for every client and every industry. But staying true to my initial vision of being a highly specialized service provider, we continue to produce results for a growing list of clients who prefer to start with the right equipment for the job. We’ve become that trusty longboard to help them ride the changing waves that continue to punctuate the ever-changing Internet landscape.