There was no garage. We started in a pram room as a digital company. We celebrate our birthday on the day our founder and CEO, Jan Bezděk, registered the siteone.cz domain. It was on 17 January 2001.

It may seem strange, but our start was positively influenced by the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the US a year before we were founded. Why was it positive? As the hype around the dot-com companies disappeared, customers started asking about the real benefits of digital solutions. At SiteOne, we focus on practicality, so we stood out.

Only 20 years ago, they didn’t have a name for it yet :). Some of the first big names that wanted to do business with us included 2N Telekomunikace or Schneider Electric.

The year 2005 was marked by the advent of Flash technology. We had one of the best teams in the Czech Republic, so it’s no surprise that we were the main supplier of flash games for companies such as Czech Television. The conservative banking sector also adopted the Flash technology and the concept of Rich Internet Applications, and we helped clients such as the Dutch Rabobank or the Czech financial group J&T with projects.

The app enabled real-time trading on stock markets in the Czech Republic and the USA. It had many advanced features for its time, such as the streaming of current stock prices, interactive charts and highly-developed security. All this was possible thanks to the Flash technology, also used by YouTube at the time.

We were one of the first in the Czech Republic to adopt Flash and the first to “kill” it in favour of JavaScript frameworks that enabled our solutions to run on mobile devices. Especially on iPhone, which started its triumphant campaign in the US in 2007 and literally conquered Europe in 2009 and 2010.

A new digital booking system, together with a new website and the possibility of booking a trip directly online, was a true revolution. At that time, even Invia still completed its internet bookings over the phone. We also provided Blue Style with a B2B platform for brick-and-mortar travel agencies, bringing the digital booking of holidays and trips even to the smallest town in the Czech Republic.

During the 2010s, we welcomed Home Credit and Air Bank to the SiteOne family and immediately designed and created new platforms for them. Air Bank received the first banking platform in the Czech Republic that used single-page applications. This meant lightning-fast page loading on mobile phones even with the then-common 2G internet connection, interactive calculators and other tools that clients still appreciate today.

Maybe it was our friendly approach and constant focus on our clients’ success. Anyways, we were able to welcome new clients and other familiar names to our client portfolio over the following years. Czech University of Life Sciences, Gorenje, AXA, Sanofi, E.ON, Zonky, Dermacol, EUC and many others.

It’s also encoded in SiteOne’s DNA to commit to improving the world around us. It is sometimes known as CSR, but we don’t particularly like this acronym because it is very abstract and can encompass many things. In the years 2019 and 2020, we helped the Unicef team to launch the new unicef.cz website, which helped them better showcase all the good they have done and communicate more effectively with donors. We have also sponsored the Independent Journalism Foundation and State Watch for some years now.

In recent years, we have also focused on our own products to help solve the most common challenges of digitizing a business. These were OmniOne – marketing automation, TempliOne – a tool for creating responsive emails, MapsOne – maps with a whisperer that helped organize relief efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Shieldr – protection against automated downloads of web content.

At SiteOne, we believe that digitization is the cure for a majority of the problems bothering today’s society. We have the expertise, insight, competence and drive :) And we are ready to put our shoulders to the wheel. Maybe your project will be next :)