This month, we have been assembling the portfolio for Petite Nation Numérique, which has meant reviewing a great deal of past work, some of it partly forgotten. Throughout the process, 2001 has served as a reference point.
In January of that year, Drupal 1.0 was released and Wikipedia went online. The Wayback Machine opened to the public that fall. WordPress did not yet exist. Facebook was three years away, and the iPhone six. Most small businesses that had a website at all had a brochure made by a relative in a tool no one remembers.
This article does not attempt to reconstruct exactly what we believed in 2001. It sets out the lessons we would share with a business starting out then, twenty-five years on.
What changes, and what stays the same?
Tools change every year; customers' questions do not. We have built on Drupal and WordPress, hand-coded static pages, used AI app builders, and seen a dozen "this changes everything" platforms come and go. Each one seemed permanent while it lasted.
What never changed was what the customer wanted to know: Where are you? Are you open? How much does it cost? Can I trust you? Is this for someone like me?
A Vancouver client in the 2000s, a dive operator in Bali in 2013, a food truck with Mexicombi around 2015, a business in Montpellier in 2026: the same questions. The businesses that succeeded online were those that answered them clearly and quickly, whatever the technology of the year. Those that pursued the technology and neglected the questions usually spent a great deal for little return.
Our advice is therefore to learn the tools without being carried away by them, and to begin every project with the customer's questions. That approach does not go out of date.
Why should a business own its content and its audience?
Because anything built on another company's platform can be changed or withdrawn. We learned this lesson through experience, more than once.
At Raincity Studios, we wrote extensively; colleagues and we published hundreds of posts over the years. Eventually, the blog went offline. Most of it survived only because the Internet Archive had crawled it. This month, we finally restored it, translated, with the original authors credited. A few backups would have avoided a great deal of work.
Then came the social media years. We helped dive operators build their digital and social media strategies, and observed Facebook's organic reach decline year after year. Pages that had worked hard to earn their followers ended up paying to reach them. Google+ launched with great fanfare in 2011 and was shut down for consumers in 2019.
The pattern is consistent. What a business owns is its domain, its website, its content and its email list. Everything else is rented. Rented space is useful, but it should never hold the only copy of anything.
How should a business approach new technology?
With curiosity and scepticism at the same time, a balance that is harder to maintain than it appears.
We obtained early access to GPT-3 and recognized its significance immediately. In the fall of 2022, we started ChatGPT RPG, using language models as game masters for solo role-playing. In 2023, our founder wrote a beginner's guide to ChatGPT in English and French. We continue to build with these tools constantly. Curiosity has served us well.
Scepticism has served us equally well. We have seen many confident predictions: every business would need an app; every business would need a Second Life island; voice search would replace typing. Some came partly true, most did not, and almost none on the timeline being promoted. AI is the most significant shift we have seen in twenty-five years, and it is also surrounded by more hype than anything before it.
Our recommendation: try new tools yourself, early and hands-on, and exercise great caution with anyone asking for a substantial payment before you understand what the tool does.
What other lessons have held up?
Several shorter ones:
- Document everything: decisions, instructions, the reasons behind choices. They will be needed one day, by you and by those who follow.
- The best work comes from knowing the place. On a small island in Indonesia or in a village in Quebec, local knowledge consistently outperformed sophisticated tools.
- Reviews and real photos matter more than anything a business says about itself.
- Paper maps and a compass still work when the battery runs out. Our first Algonquin trip, about thirty years ago, relied entirely on paper. The canoe trips of 2021 and 2022 confirmed the value of knowing how to navigate without a screen.
Where has this path led?
We left Vancouver at the end of 2010 for Thailand, then Bali, then a small island next to Nusa Lembongan, where we opened a dive centre in 2015 that was later recognized for its work on the reef. Then Montreal during the pandemic, and since 2025, Montpellier, in the Petite-Nation, where we launched a web and AI agency in August.
The itinerary may appear to involve many moves. In practice, it was largely the same work in different places: helping people explain what they do, to the people who need it, honestly and clearly, with whatever tools are available that year.
Part of that work is presented in the portfolio, and much more in the archive on the blog. In another twenty-five years, this list will be worth reviewing again.