We won an award for building a web page.
I should be more specific. In 2001, my team won a PRSA Anvil Award for putting a press release online with some tabs. That's it. A press release, some product specs, a few low-resolution images, and a page that said "Media Contacts."
If that sounds absurd, it was. And also, it wasn't.
The Assembly Line Era
To understand why tabs on a webpage mattered, you need to understand what came before.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was working at major PR agencies—Brodeur in Boston, later the Hoffman Agency in Silicon Valley. Our clients were Fortune 500 companies with products to launch and journalists to impress. The communications toolkit was remarkably physical: glossy folders, printed press releases, B-roll videotapes, audio cassettes, and, if we were feeling cutting-edge, a floppy disk with some JPEGs. While tools like FrontPage promised point-and-click web development, serious work still required hand-coding.
Getting information to journalists meant assembling media kits by hand. Literally by hand. Junior staff would form assembly lines in the agency's back rooms, passing folders down a long table. One person inserted the press release. Another added the product sheet. Someone else dropped in the photos. A final person checked the kit, sealed the envelope, and slapped on a FedEx label.
The lead times were brutal. You had to finish creative, get approvals from legal, send everything to print, wait for delivery, assemble, and ship—all while praying nothing changed. Because once those kits hit the mail, they were gone. If a spec was wrong or legal caught something at the last minute, too bad. The information was already scattered across newsrooms from coast to coast.
The only alternative was the wire services, which cost hundreds of dollars per release and resulted in faxes being printed in newsrooms. Yes, faxes. Because this was before most reporters used email daily.
The Moment in the Conference Room
At Brodeur, the agency's idea of "digital communications" was burning materials onto CD-ROMs. My team took one of these CDs into a conference room one day and just stared at it. It seemed ridiculous—all the slowness and risk of the physical media kit, now in a format that might not even be compatible with the journalist's computer.
Someone said it out loud: "Why don't we just put this on the web?"
The concept seems obvious now. It was not obvious then. We sat in that fancy Boston conference room feeling like we'd invented something. In a way, we had—not the technology, but the application. We were figuring out that the internet wasn't just a place to put digital brochures. It was a communications channel that could replace the entire distribution model.
I built the first prototype myself because I knew HTML and a little ASP Classic. These weren't skills I learned in school—there were no web development courses when I graduated in the late 1990s. I'd taught myself because I liked tech, and suddenly that hobby made me valuable in ways nobody had anticipated.
The prototype was humble: the company logo at the top, "Interactive Press Kit" in bold, and a row of tabs. Press Release. Product Specs. Media Contacts. Company Information. Each tab loaded a new page—we didn't even have the framework for the smooth tab-switching you'd see today.
When we showed it to the broader team, people were genuinely amazed. Not because it was technically impressive, but because of what it meant: no print deadlines, no assembly lines, no FedEx bills, no irreversible mistakes. You could update statistics while standing at a trade show booth. You could fix a typo an hour before the press conference. The information was never "out there" beyond your control.
The HP Blade Server Launch
The project I remember most clearly was for Hewlett-Packard's Blade servers when I was at the Hoffman Agency in Silicon Valley. HP was announcing what were, at the time, cutting-edge servers—compact, modular machines designed for data centers that needed maximum computing power in minimum space. Blade servers were a genuinely new category in 2001, and HP was competing with startups like RLX Technologies to define the market.
The announcement was big enough that CEO Carly Fiorina was involved. The PR team was traveling to a major trade show. And we built them an interactive media room.
It had everything from the old media kits—press release, product specs, photos (probably GIFs, definitely not high-resolution), company information, executive bios—but online, updateable, and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
The account team quickly discovered what "updateable" meant. They emailed me changes every 15 minutes in the days leading up to launch. Change this sentence. Add a comma here. Update this specification. As a 23-year-old director who had built a rudimentary CMS specifically so they could make these changes themselves, I was not thrilled about becoming a comma-placement service.
I have since humbled myself. If you'd like to pay me to move your comma today, I will gladly do it.
But the launch was a success. We tracked visits with primitive hit counters—before Google Analytics existed—and saw the spike we wanted. More importantly, we'd proven that the distribution model could change. Information could flow directly from client to journalist without the printing, mailing, and assembly lines and crossed fingers.
We won an Anvil Award for that work. I remember sitting at a black-tie dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, surrounded by PR professionals in tuxedos and evening gowns, accepting an industry award for putting a press release on the internet with some tabs.
What I Learned (And Still Believe)
I didn't fully appreciate what I was living through at the time. I was young, promoted fast because web skills were rare and couldn't be gained through seniority, working on big accounts because the agencies had Fortune 500 clients willing to experiment. I thought I was just doing my job.
Looking back, I was present for a genuine transition—the moment when public relations collided with the web and both were changed by the contact. We weren't the only ones figuring this out; teams at agencies across the world were asking the same questions. But we were on the forefront, and the thinking we developed then shaped everything that came after.
Here's what stayed with me: every website is, at some level, an interactive media room. The technology has evolved beyond recognition—we have content management systems, responsive design, embedded video, and forms that actually work. But the fundamental purpose hasn't changed. You're organizing information for an audience. You're making it accessible, updateable, and controllable. You're solving the same problem we solved with those first tabbed pages: how do you get the right information to the right people at the right time, and how do you maintain control over the narrative?
When I build WordPress sites for clients today—tech companies, nonprofits, professional associations—I still think about them this way. The interface is infinitely more sophisticated than anything I built in ASP Classic. But the strategic thinking? That came from a conference room in Boston, staring at a CD-ROM and asking why we couldn't just put it on the web.
We won an award for building a web page. Twenty-four years later, I'm still building web pages. The fact that the simple ones impressed people then, and the complex ones are expected now, doesn't change what matters: understanding what you're trying to communicate, to whom, and why the web is the right way to do it.
That understanding came from being there when it was all brand new. And for that, I'm grateful—even if I had to move a few commas to get here.