Born from a joke: couches ruin more bodies than running ever will. On fewer than 20 posts it drew a quarter-million visitors a year — outranking shoe brands for their own shoes. It went quiet while my wife and I adopted three kids; the kids are bigger now, and it's growing again.
Web designer & builder — Colorado Springs, Colorado
Twenty years on the web. Still learning.
I'm Brian — co-founder of King Grizzly, a small, senior web studio. I design, build, and look after websites people depend on to help their endeavors grow. I'm also a dad, ponderer, explorer and tall person.
01
Now
King Grizzly is the studio my brother Robb and I built — intentionally small, deliberately senior, small town honest.
We design, build, and care for WordPress sites for growing organizations that need expert web help without hiring another full-timer. Most clients stay for years and treat us as an extension of their marketing team or agency.
Somewhere along the way I became the third-ranked contributor — out of 21,000 — on the Elementor forums. I still teach WordPress on YouTube.
02
Path
2004
Left Northern Arizona University with a design degree and a web emphasis, then spent my twenties on branding and print.
The pivot
Clients kept asking for websites, so I taught myself to design, build, and rank them.
The publisher
A six-year day job, where I learned many lessons as an Interactive Art Director while building and maintaining dozens of sites. It was a privilege to work with a wide variety of stakeholders on properties in the publishing, music, and curriculum industries—including some well-known authors. Valuable years.
The exit
Built King Grizzly's foundations on the side, transitioned out, and have been building up ever since. We've got a small crew of absolute professionals and relationships with amazing clients and partners.
03
Experiments
My favorite continuing education: build something real, then see what the internet does with it.
A structured best-shoes index: intentionally generic so it could be sold someday, obsessively marked up with schema, served fully static. Part SEO experiment, part shoe problem.
04
Field notes
Raised in the high desert. Still out in it.
I grew up in Gallup, New Mexico — Four Corners country, among Navajo, Zuni, and Ute cultures. Some describe it as a place of thin veil, where heaven and hell sit a little closer to earth.
It left a mark. I'm most alive outdoors, usually on a trail, still pondering the human condition and what a good life asks of us. Some of that thinking leaks out as photography.
One Mt. Hood frame has 4.4 million views on Unsplash — it's been used by REI and Trail Runner Magazine.
05
Say hi
I like hearing from other humans, makers, and ponderers.
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