When Kim and I started Mocoda in 1996, most of our early clients didn’t have a website. The pitch wasn’t “let us improve your web presence.” The pitch was “you’re going to need one of these.”
Nearly thirty years later, every client has not just a website but a mobile app, a social presence, a CRM, an analytics stack. The conversation has shifted from “should we do this?” to “how do we do this better?” And yet some things about the work haven’t changed at all.
What Has Changed: Almost Everything Technical
The technology underneath what we build has turned over completely, several times. We started with tables-based HTML layouts and inline styles. We moved through CSS standardization, then content management systems, then JavaScript frameworks, then responsive design, then mobile-first, then performance optimization, now AI-assisted development.
Each wave required real learning. Each wave created real anxiety about whether what we knew would still be relevant. Each wave, the answer was: some of it, yes, and you’ll figure out the rest.
The tools themselves (the design tools, the development stacks, the testing frameworks) have a half-life of maybe five years. Nobody who learned Dreamweaver in 1998 is using Dreamweaver today. Nobody who’s hand-coding HTML in 2025 will still be doing it the same way in 2030.
What the Mobile Shift Taught Us
If I’m being honest, mobile caught us flatter-footed than I’d like to admit. When the iPhone launched in 2007, we understood what it was. What we underestimated was how completely it would reshape user expectations, not just on mobile, but across everything.
Suddenly clients who had been satisfied with a solid desktop site were fielding complaints from customers who couldn’t use it on their phone. Responsive design went from a nice-to-have to table stakes in about 18 months. We adapted, but I remember how disorienting that pace felt.
I think about that period a lot now, watching what AI is doing to the industry.
What Hasn’t Changed: Everything That Matters
Here’s what I’ve noticed over three decades: the technical stack is almost irrelevant to whether a client relationship works.
What makes a project succeed, at Mocoda and in every other context I’ve worked in, is whether the people involved trust each other, communicate clearly, and are honest about what’s working and what isn’t. Whether you’re building in PHP or React or with an AI-assisted no-code tool, those dynamics determine the outcome.
Clients don’t come back to Mocoda because we’ve always been on the latest stack. They come back because when we say we’ll deliver something, we deliver it. When there’s a problem, we tell them. When we don’t know something, we say so.
That sounds basic. In practice, it’s rare enough to create real loyalty.
On Longevity in a Fast-Moving Industry
People sometimes ask how a studio like ours has lasted this long when so many boutique shops come and go. I think the honest answer is that we’ve always treated the relationships as the actual product. The websites, the apps: those are artifacts. What we’re really building is trust over time.
That doesn’t mean resting on it. The moment you think “we’ve been doing this for thirty years, we have this figured out” is roughly the moment you start falling behind. The willingness to keep learning, to approach AI the same way we approached responsive design, mobile-first, and every other shift, is what keeps the work interesting.
Kim and I started Mocoda because we loved building things. Thirty years later, that’s still true. The tools keep changing. The reasons don’t.