Curt had chosen Drupal as his platform of choice for building websites by the Summer of 2007. In June he attended a band festival in Illinois where he met the festival's organizer who was also the music minister for a small rural Illinois church. Curt asked him: "Does your church have a website?" The answer was something like this: "Yea, I think we have one. But, I don't visit it much."
Curt looked at that website, and others for similar organizations, i.e., small churches. What he frequently found could be described, unfortunately, as "three or four pages, poorly done, and never updated."
The average church in the United States has about 200 members. Nobody should ever fault a small organization for not having the inherent resources to build a good website. Yet these organizations really need a viable website to be visible to the public in general, and potential visitors and new members in particular. This was an area where Curt could use his talents to serve churches and, more importantly, serve God.
Some investigation led to the decision to form as a LLC, Limited Liability Company. Next he needed a name for this company. Two initial choices, Outreach Technologies (preferred) and Outreach Technology (OK, but not great), had already been registered by others and were not available. Some head scratching and doodling let to combining Curt's last name, Trout, with the word Outreach, what he wanted to help his clients to do. A search of the Internet found only one other use of the term Troutreach, an outreach program of the New Jersey Aquarium. Since there's no overlap between what they do and what we do, we took the name Troutreach Technologies. We like it! And, it's a much better choice than our original ideas.
We registered the domain name, Troutreach.com, and in November 2007 registered Troutreach Technologies LLC with the State of Minnesota, and the IRS, and finally opened business banking accounts.
Troutreach Technologies LLC exists:
- To help small churches, parachurch organizations, nonprofits, and commercial enterprises establish and maintain what we like to call a credible web presence, a good looking and well functioning website.
- To build websites that are easy for our clients to maintain, that is, to add and update information.
- To build websites that are inexpensive enough to be easily affordable by our clients. We often say: A good website doesn't have to be expensive.
- To establish long term relationships with our clients.