Fun Sun Studio

After the personal-site years, the hobby went pro. Somewhere around 2007 the “superterran” web habit turned into an actual business: a small Pawleys Island, South Carolina design-and-hosting shop. It started as Fun Sun Studio and later rebranded to 131 Digital. I was, per my own emails, “the web guy.”

The rebrand was mine to drive — part of growing the shop up from a hobby name into something that read like a real agency. The name stuck better than I did: 131 Digital still trades under it today.

Waccamaw Web Works was its own thing — a solo spin I started on the side and never really followed through on, one of several business names that got a logo before my attention moved to the next idea. It still picked up the odd job, though: it’s the design credit on the Lowcountry Jewelers build below.

The pitch

Fun Sun Studio’s 2007 site sold it as “Graphix • Print • Web — Digital Creations”: a firm doing custom, non-template e-commerce, graphic design, and print — business cards, letterheads, t-shirts, “pens, stickers and pencils” — all hosted in-house on Mac OS X G5 Xserve servers.

Break free from the template driven world and become unique.

We specialize in small business, charitable, ministry and informational websites to help organizations with a professional site without a large investment.

The whole thing was pitched as “easy as 1‑2‑3,” and we were ambitious enough to run a “Salesperson Needed” ad to grow across Horry and Georgetown counties. Behind the marketing copy the stack was real: custom shopping carts (ZenCart and my own Fusion CMS), authorize.net payments, WordPress builds, HostGator hosting, Piwik analytics. The studio’s own social-app product is preserved here as Hive.

The migration

The shop had run on its own hardware — a Mac OS X Xserve that was genuinely beautiful, and genuinely expensive to keep. When the studio lost access to that box, I moved everything off it: rehosted the operation on HostGator and rebuilt most of the client sites by crawling the live versions back into place from whatever was still reachable. It was the same trick this museum runs on — reconstruct from what survives — a good decade before I’d do it again here.

The work

Four of the client sites I built, recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Palmetto Cheese

The one still on shelves — and the one I still bring up. “The Pimento Cheese with Soul!” grew from a Pawleys Island deli into a brand stocked in grocery stores across the country, and its early site is credited to 131 Digital. A lot of household-name brands have come and gone across my work since, but this is the one I point to first: my first big brand — the first time something I built sat on the shelf next to a product people actually recognized.

Surf The Earth

A lowcountry surf shop. This build is credited to 131 Digital.

Lowcountry Jewelers

Fine jewelry in Pawleys Island — “custom crafted by Lowcountry Jewelers of Pawleys Island SC,” credited to Waccamaw Web Works.

An interior-design client

An interior-design client, written up in the studio’s own portfolio:

[The designer]’s design approach is to create fresh and unique environments… There is nothing more rewarding than bringing a client’s vision to life… Residential, Commercial & Hospitality Design since 1985, from New York to Florida.

The studio’s portfolio post and a screenshot of her site are kept in the archive; her live domain didn’t survive the crawls.

Paid in pancakes

Not every job paid in dollars. I built a Litchfield restaurant’s site in barter — the rate was a year of free pancakes. Worth every byte.

Provenance

Assembled from the 2007 funsunstudio.com homepage, the 131digital.com portfolio blog, and Wayback captures of the client sites. Raw client snapshots and the full research trail live in the private archive; client correspondence is kept out of the public record.