My journey into technology started at an early age of 12, out of a love for creating and building things with computers. Creative work, particularly graphics and design stood out early on, and I was soon getting real, paying clients for it. As I spent more time in that world, I naturally started needing professional websites for the different ventures I was involved in.

What I didn't expect was that trying to get a good website built would teach me so much about what's wrong with how websites and other technologies are usually delivered to businesses.

Over the years, I hired people to build professional websites for me three different times, for different ventures. Each experience taught me something different.

The first time, it was a problem of competence. The website looked beautiful, but it was painfully slow, and there were technical issues the person I'd hired couldn't explain to me satisfactorily. I remember thinking: how can something look this good and still be this frustrating to use?

The second time, the website worked, but ownership became the problem. I had fully paid for the work, yet I never truly received ownership of what I'd paid for. Eventually, the person I'd hired disappeared, and I was left without the support or access I expected. That experience taught me that having a website built for you and actually owning what you paid for are not always the same thing.

The third time was different again. The website was built on a platform with pre-built components, and while it looked good, it wasn't bringing my business any real value. Then came the high, recurring monthly costs. I eventually realized that what I'd paid for wasn't an owned website in the way I'd assumed. I had essentially paid for access to a platform where the website lived. And beyond the cost, there was a bigger problem: the website wasn't giving my business any meaningful value, or even a signal that it would eventually start doing what I wanted it to do. I couldn't confidently say it was generating the value I'd intended.

After those three experiences, I began to notice a pattern.

The problem wasn't simply finding someone who could make a website or build a piece of technology. There was a much bigger gap.

A business owner can easily end up with a website or any technology where:

• the person building it doesn't fully understand what they're doing;
• the website is treated as a product to sell, rather than a business tool to make work;
• ownership and control aren't properly understood;
• the developer disappears once the project is delivered; or
• nobody is seriously asking whether it's actually producing the intended business results.

That last point became the most important one to me.
Why build something for a business if we aren't genuinely concerned about what it's doing for that business?

So I started looking deeper into the industry and speaking to other people and I realized the gap I'd experienced wasn't something I wanted to simply complain about. I wanted to create a difference.

That's what gave birth to Aterson Technologies.

I wanted to build a company that approaches websites and technology from a fundamentally different starting point: the website or technology must serve the business, not the other way around.

As a fullstack software developer myself with over three years working across desktop applications, web backends and frontends, and automation, I understand both sides of this problem: what it actually takes to build something properly, and what it feels like when it's not.

At Aterson, we don't begin by asking “what kind of website would you like us to build?” We begin by asking “what does your business actually need this website to accomplish?”

From there, we work to understand the business, understand its customers, develop the right strategy, build around that strategy, measure what happens, and continuously improve until we can confidently say a meaningful transformation has occurred.

Because I experienced these problems personally, I'm particularly passionate about helping business owners understand the technology they're investing in:

• You should know what your website is supposed to do.
• You should understand what you're paying for.
• You should know what you own.
• And you should be able to tell whether what you're investing in is actually transforming your business.

These aren't statements on a wall they're the values Aterson Technologies was built around.

And if we ever have clear evidence that we're falling short of them, I'd rather acknowledge it, make it right, and walk away from a project than knowingly deliver technology that doesn't create the impact it was meant to create.

That's why measuring isn't an optional extra at Aterson. It's part of how we work.

We don't want to simply build websites or technologies for businesses. We want to be part of the journey from story to glory.