Creative Sites Media was founded by Mark Andrew Lockett in 1999. Married in June 2000 to his high school sweetheart, Dawn Cheryl, Mark moved CSM to Nashville, Tennessee where he currently is based out of.

Through three records with a touring band, Mark learned of a growing need for web marketing and online fan bases. Today this is essential for aspiring artist and bands to develop their niche. Back in 1998, when the band was first signed, the record label told us we had to find someone to develop our website. The guys found that web design can break a band quickly. To design a simple website from a quality designer, the band would have to come up with around $4,500.00. On top of this, the band would have to budget a monthly payment to keep the content updated. The band decided to go with a fan that offered to make the site for free.

Lesson 1: You get what you pay for. Having a fan make the site was a bad idea. The design was good, but when someone offers you a service for free, you have no right to push for updates, quick changes and frequent service requests. This left the band with a very outdated website throughout the entire first record.

When the second record rolled around the band knew they would pay a good designer to create the site this time. So $4,500.00 later, the site was done and the band had no money to pay for updates. So again, we had a very outdated site for the first part of the record.

Lesson 2: Depend on yourself to keep your site updated. This is when Creative Sites Media was born. We set some goals:

• We wanted to develop quality sites.
• We wanted to offer our services for far less than other quality web designers.
• We wanted to make the content updateable by the client so they never have to pay a web geek to update their site again.