The Beginning

More than 20 years ago - founding Director Rob Swan was commissioned to build his first commercial website, back when the web was for nerds, smartphones didn’t exist, and the hallways of domestic homes hummed with the beeps and clicks of dial-up modems. 👴

Since those early days we’ve watched the internet grow and develop to becoming the beating heart of business and commerce that it has become today.

Fuelled on Coffee

In 2004, Rob established a solid track record of writing trend-setting articles for web design magazines, gained experience of running a successful small agency (we were once called ‘Fuelled on Coffee’, we do sometimes wish we'd kept it with our weekly coffee spend), and spent several years gaining experience working for a range of web design agencies and clients as a PHP developer. ☕

Training the Unemployed

Open Door Internet as were known back then, actually started with a staff of two to provide web design training and mentoring for the long term unemployed. The coffee-shop-based training scheme saw great success, and the web development arm of Open Door Internet continued to thrive – providing bespoke website and database solutions for customers. 🤗

A new platform

We restructured to develop the pay-monthly website platform which now serves as the cornerstone of our technical offering.

This progressive platform opened the door to far more cost-effective client relationships, where our own business success was far more closely linked to the ongoing success of our clients. All of a sudden clients could manage their own website, add their own pages and change content at the click of a button. ✅

Marketing Services

Rob Fellingham, our Marketing Director based in Seaton, joined the core team to drive the diversification of our online marketing offering. Rob saw that the company gained recognition as an official Google Partner and introduced a range of SEO and marketing offerings. 📈

During this period the Open Door Internet’s web and email servers moved from the USA to the UK, to ease the introduction of GDPR and future-proof our planned expansion. Always looking ahead... 🥸

A Rapidly Growing Platform

By this stage, our eCommerce platform now processed hundreds of thousands of pounds of online orders for local businesses every year, and Open Door Internet managed 150+ websites on our pay monthly website platform 💸

It seems that a few of the big boys in the web industry stole our idea and grew faster than us. Boo you Wix and Squarespace - our platform is better! 😎

The Strangest Of Years

Whilst we were all locked in, the time was right to rebrand the company to Sonder Digital. Our fantastic admin area fondly became known as 'Envelope', and we launched our 'Canvas Mode', an intuitive website editor that lets you visually change your website as though it were a simple Word Document. ✒️ 

We also welcomed Steve Towells as our copywriter - a fantastic wordsmith, he improved our offering across the board. Later in the year, we were joined by Jack Turner, a fantastic Marketeer to help keep our growing client list on track. 👪

We rounded off this strange year with some new awards 🏆

• Most Innovative Online Marketing Firm 
• Distinction award for online excellence

Improving the Team

With Envelope growing and being used by hundreds of people every day, it became increasingly important to keep things at the cutting edge of technology 🔪 Brad Ellis joined us as Lead Developer and helped the dev team scale new heightes. This quite rapidly enabled us to make some fantastic improvements to the platform and give an even better service to clients. 💻

Alex Rowe joined as Senior Account Manager to ensure our biggest clients had the smoothest relationship possible, whilst Rob Larcombe came aboard the good ship Sonder as Head of Design. 🎨

Phew, what a year.

Today...

And here we are 😅 We welcomed Lillie who heads up our social and paid ads offering - having worked for nationally renowned brands in her previous role.

We scooped up two more awards in early 2024 - winning Best Marketing Agency in the South West from the Prestige Awards, as well as Best Place To Work award in the Jurassic Business Awards.

What a blimmin' team 🕺