Ben McGinnis

I earned my B.A. in Political Science at The Ohio State University in Columbus, spent two years at Apple as a Creative and a Specialist, then earned my M.S. in Instruction Technology & Design from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

Political science is the study of how people are persuaded, and how institutions actually behave versus how they say they behave. Apple is where I learned that nobody in front of you cares how the thing works — only whether it works for them, today, without a manual. Instruction technology and design is the study of how people learn from something somebody built for them to learn from. Put those three together and you have most of this job.

In 2020 I started this business in Columbus under the name ROOM 116 — one person, one idea: local businesses deserved better websites and marketing than they were getting from templated agencies and freelancers who disappeared once the invoice cleared.

Then I moved it to Steubenville. That decision gets questioned more than any other one I've made, usually by people who think you build an agency in a city or you don't build one at all. Steubenville is a steel and river town thirty minutes from Pittsburgh that knows what it means to build something meant to last. That's the standard I hold the work to, and clients three states over can tell the difference.

The name grew with the client list — ROOM 116, then McGinnis Made, then McGinnis Creative Group as the team caught up to the work. We're at 401 Market Street now, serving Steubenville, Weirton, Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Akron and Cincinnati.

My wife Jamie McGinnis and I are raising five children here — Liam, Luca, Lochlan, Piper and Carmen. That is the actual reason the business is in Steubenville and not somewhere with better coffee.

It also explains how I run it. When you are responsible for seven people, you stop being interested in work that looks impressive and start being interested in work that holds up. You don't take a client you can't serve well. You don't build something on a platform you'll be apologizing for in three years. And you answer the phone, because somebody's business is on the other end of it and they have people counting on them too.

There are two ways agencies get technology wrong and they're the same mistake. One shop uses a single tool for everything because it's the only tool they have, and bends whatever doesn't fit until it mostly works. The other writes everything from scratch — custom checkout, custom content system — which sounds thorough and on a five-year horizon is a catastrophe.

Both choose for the convenience of the vendor instead of the outcome of the client. The rule I actually use is simpler: build the part that makes you different, buy the part that somebody else already solved better than we could inside your budget.

Your design, the way your business is explained, the thing you do that the competitor down the road doesn't — that gets built by a person, for you. Payments, checkout, fraud, email delivery, maps, authentication — bought. Nobody has ever chosen a business because it wrote its own checkout. People choose businesses every day because the website made them feel like they were dealing with professionals.

I won't publish a number I can't source, put a fake award badge in the footer, or write a case study about work we didn't do. I won't tell you that you own something you don't, and I won't dress up a template as a custom build.

If that costs us a job occasionally, fine. The clients who've been with me since the Columbus days are still here for exactly that reason.