I went for lunch with a long-standing customer on Wednesday.

After working together for the best part of 20 years, it was interesting to reflect on how things have evolved online during that time.

We harked back to the early days of ecommerce, including open-source PHP/ASP checkout scripts, the endless debugging, clunky TXT based content management systems, and the evolution of Amazon from an online book store to what it is now.

We also recalled an amusing project which involved the sale of discounted cigarettes online which came from Singapore. For clarity, this was nothing to do with his particular customer, it was just something a mutual contact was doing back in 2009.

As I thought back over the past 20+ years of BY Design, the technology and the way we do things has changed immensely, but the core values of the business and what I set out to achieve haven’t changed. It’s always been about providing a consistent, reliable, transparent service, to meet the needs of whoever comes through the door or inbox. A bridge between visual design and technical function, free from jargon, with real human relationships at the core.

When everything around us is changing so fast, it’s important that some things remain the same.