There was a stretch when this company built more than a hundred websites for small businesses. This is what survives.
Open nowIn the 2000s I ran TrailsWeb LLC out of Flagstaff, Arizona, and for a stretch we were a small-business website factory. The TrailsWeb Express program sold sites to restaurants, mechanics, podiatrists, yacht brokers, hair studios, courier services, alpaca ranches — anyone with a business card and a story to tell. At the high-water mark, the IIS console on my server listed 108 websites.
The best artifact of the era might be the InstantSite program: a custom professional website, online within 24 hours, $1500 all inclusive. You booked one of exactly two phone appointments per week, spent 30 minutes with our content author and 15 with our graphic designer, and a day later your business was on the internet. Keeping that pipeline running meant hiring and managing a real team — writers, designers, developers. At our peak, I employed six people and we made websites like a well-oiled machine.
65 of the sites survive as the tiny promotional thumbnails from trailswebexpress.com. They're shown here at the size they were saved — there is no bigger version to click through to. Every one of these was a real business that trusted us with their storefront.
My real takeaway from building all those websites wasn't technical. It was working with and managing a team of people, running my business into the ground, and getting to learn a little bit about a lot of different industries from an insider's perspective. To build someone's website you have to understand how their business actually works — how a courier prices a route, how a podiatrist fills a schedule, how a yacht broker finds a buyer.
I had a ton of fun, I lost a lot of money, and I learned about all kinds of things people do to make money. Some of the most useful education I ever paid for.