Building Web sites, building trust, students become businessmen

By: BRADLEY J. FIKES - Staff Writer | Wednesday, September 5, 2007 11:06 PM PDT ∞

NORTH COUNTY -- Jeff Herman and Steve Kenyon got more than an education from La Costa Canyon High School. They got a career.

The duo's Web design work for the La Costa high school gave them entree into larger educational markets, such as the San Dieguito Union High School District, which serves Encinitas, La Costa, Solana Beach, Del Mar and Carmel Valley.

Now they've formed a company, Vista-based Pinnacle Innovations LLC, that has performed work for more than 45 clients, not only schools but private businesses.

Web design long ago became a commodity, with numerous companies offering services from basic small-business sites to massive, full-service, e-commerce operations for major corporations. Pinnacle Innovations (www.pinnacleinnovations.org) is carving out a niche on the strength of referrals.

Herman is chief executive officer and Kenyon is chief operating officer of the company, founded in February 2006, a few months before they graduated from high school. Kenyon works on the programming, while Herman focuses on site design. Last week, they hired a project manager, David Pain. He is a senior at La Costa Canyon.

Herman, who will attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo starting this month, and Kenyon, who starts in a few weeks at UC San Diego, plan to keep the business running while they go to college.

"Ninety percent of our business we can do remotely," Herman said. "The one thing we can't do is meetings and stuff like that. Steve and David will handle that for now."

The three also will regularly use videoconferencing, in addition to e-mail and phone to keep in touch, he said. The company obtained office space in Vista from a client, Applied Control Concepts Inc., Herman said, performing work in exchange for the space.

Pinnacle Innovations is fast and accurate with its custom-designed work, said Mike Coy, head of technology for the San Dieguito district.

"They are businessmen who show a lot of maturity for their age," Coy said of the two 18-year-olds. "They're good at custom programming and they also have good reliability."

Herman and Kenyon designed a Web site (https://hs.sduhsd.net/index.php?) for the district's school selection "lottery." The site replaces the manual process of selecting cards out of a paper bag to determine which students get entrance to the district's sought-after "academy" schools, such as San Dieguito Academy in Encinitas.

Because no off-the-shelf software existed for this specialized purpose, Coy said the two built it themselves with their design, programming and database skills.

Human skills also played a role. They were careful to build up trust by tackling and completing a series of increasingly more ambitious projects. By degrees, they proved to the school district they could be trusted with access and in turn got more work.

"We have a commitment to finishing projects and making sure they're what the client wanted," Herman said. With the school district, several visits were needed after the project was complete to make sure it worked to the district's satisfaction.

Herman and Kenyon started out by bidding for small jobs posted online, such as one for Sega-16, devoted to online gaming. Their first educational assignment was to develop a Web site for the La Costa Canyon High School Tutoring Center (http://lcctutor.com).

La Costa Canyon High School then chose them to develop a more fully featured Web site, which gave parents and students better access to information. They maintained that site for a year, Herman said, and then were entrusted with the high school district project for the lottery.

"The year before, we had a big security crisis at our high school in which test logins got stolen," Herman said. "We had to interview with the head of the technology department at San Dieguito Union High School District. We also had to make our company incorporated, for liability reasons, to work with the high school district."

The two say they like to keep Web sites simple, and use only features that provide function, as opposed to those that look pretty but don't do anything.

Gratuitous use of Flash animation technology is a common error, Herman said: Flash slows the site down, which annoys users.

"In the last several months there's been a trend to using a lot of Flash," Herman said. "We don't recommend that to the clients just because in the end it uses a lot of bandwidth, it costs a lot of money to set up and is harder to maintain. It also hurts you on your search engine listings."

-- Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com. C

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