The SOHO It Goes! History

As owner of Turtle's Web, a web graphic and information design business, Eileen Parzek has been living the realities of SOHO business since 1995. As owner of one of the very first women owned web design businesses in the Capital Region of upstate NY, her background is as broad as it is deep. Ms. Parzek's experience includes a tremendous variety of design - presentation, multimedia, web, and print - combined with experience in computers, marketing, communications, administration and business.

Ms. Parzek started Turtle's Web in response to two simultaneous events. The first was being told by an employer that she would never get promoted because she did what she did out of love and would do it regardless - so why bother with all the paperwork? The second event involved being told by someone in management that the web is a fad. With utter faith that the web was a lot more than that, she took that fad, and that love, and embarked on her first SOHO adventure. Although ultimately successful, Turtle's Web was an amazing ride of feasts and famines, peaks and valleys, with an enormous amount of learning, doing and growing. Ms. Parzek was personally involved in the design, architecture and strategy of approximately 250 web sites in the first five years, with clients all over the world!

The end of the 1990's Internet wildness, the broad impact of 9/11 and then the changes in the national economy were catalysts for rethinking the direction and primary mission of Turtle's Web. Those events led her to discover just how much demand there was from small businesses and organizations for integrated design, marketing and communication services - not just web services. So, she set out to create that kind of businesses - to be an as-needed, full service online marketing department to as many small businesses as possible. And that was the genesis of SOHO It Goes!