Marknet Group Blog

Hi, my name is Tony Nieves. I live in the Town of Southeast, New York (more commonly known as Brewster, NY) which is part of Putnam County. I make my living running a web development company also in Southeast. (No Commute!!). My wife Gina and I run this company together, and we have had a ton of fun doing this. It certainly doesn’t always feel like work. We have one son born in 2007. And we are part of the small percentage of Americans that doesn’t watch TV. We do own a television, but we have no cable TV or satellite TV accounts. We probably watch about 15 rented movies a year and we subscribe to mlb.com for our Yankee baseball fix. We do not miss TV at all, and I highly recommend ditching it.

We love our work. Did I say that before? It is challenging, exciting, and full of opportunity for the right company. On the surface it would appear to be competitive as there are many small one or two person shops out there. But in reality that are very few companies that provide quality end to end solutions. We have come to realize that it is impossible for small 1 to 2 person web design firms to do enough client work to survive and pay the bills, but at the same time do enough learning and training to maintain a fresh, relevant skill set and still find the time to enjoy life!

It’s also nearly almost impossible for the small shops to provide end to end services because many of the skill sets in web design are conflicting skill sets. I haven’t met someone who is both a great graphic designer and a great programmer. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also a skill set that really requires a marketing expert. You have to understand a client’s target market and translate that into good relevant content, good key words, and an overall great SEO plan. SEO work is labor intensive and it’s tough to find the time to do this right if you’re a small shop with just one or two people. Factor in technical support, project management and sales, and you can see why over the last few years, we have seen consolidation in our industry as the small one or two person shops find that they cannot keep up with the demands.

We love Brewster, NY. It’s a great place to own a business like ours. Our office is easily accessible from RT 84, RT 684, RT 22, RT 312, RT 6, the Saw Mill Parkway and the Taconic Parkway. The Brewster slogan is “all roads lead to Brewster” We are in the heart of the Hudson valley within easy driving distance from some of New York’s most populated suburban counties: Orange County, Rockland County, Dutchess County, and of course Westchester County. We are also minutes away from the Connecticut- NY border and very close to Danbury, Connecticut, and less than an hour from Stamford, CT Norwalk, CT, New Haven, CT, and one hour from New York City. The Town of Southeast also has two metro north stops; one in the village of Brewster and a few miles north, a second stop right down the road from our office.

We believe that our strategic location gives MarkNet Group a huge competitive advantage. Although it can be easy to do business on the web, sometimes it’s just too impersonal to invest thousands of dollars on your website and marketing collateral without meeting the staff of the company you are hiring. We understand that when making any type of significant investment in their business, people want to kick the tires of the company they are looking to hire.