Celebrating 25 Years!
Pen Publishing Interactive is celebrating their 25th anniversary this year. Let's take a look back to see how our founder, Steve Pendergraft, started the company.
Entrepreneur genes run deep in the Pendergraft family. Those genes are firmly rooted in my husband, Steve. His earliest business was a bicycle repair service as he and his brother were into motocross racing when they were growing up.
As Steve grew older, he first worked for his father, Gordon Pendergraft, at GT Sales in Wichita. He worked his way up from the warehouse to management. As his father started more new businesses, Steve was exposed to everything from making ice cream to sewing insulation jackets.
In the early 90's, Steve and his college roommate and fraternity brother, John Clem, collaborated on a couple of businesses. The first was Maverick Computers (computer builds) and the second was FunSoft (collegiate screensavers and mousepads). But it was difficult to get ahead in those business, especially for FunSoft, as it was all hands on deck around the holidays with family and friends trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of orders.
Steve was fascinated with all of the new technology coming out for the internet. In 1994, Steve left his father's company and we decided to take a leap into the digital frontier and launch Pen Publishing Interactive, Inc. Pen was among the first companies in Wichita to offer email, web hosting and web design.
What a crazy year that was! We set up an office in our basement. Little did we realize at the time how much 24-7 was going to come in to play. We had to get used to the business phone line ringing late at night for customer support and get creative on ways to keep our miniature schnauzer quiet during office hours.
Pen continued to grow and we landed a contract with Multimedia Cablevision (now Cox) to host their business customers' email and websites for Kansas and Oklahoma. That was a very successful partnership for almost 20 years.
In 2000, we moved our office to 239 S. Pattie in downtown Wichita. Pen's first employees included my parents, Lloyd and Janet Giebler, and our son's former babysitter, Karla Goewert.
Since that start, Pen's services have expanded to include FlipperSD™ content management system, domain service management, Zix email encryption, Microsoft Office 365 products and online marketing.
To all of our partners, we want to say thank you for trusting and believing in us along the way. We are looking forward to the next twenty five years working with you!
-Rhonda Pendergraft
Vice President, Pen Publishing Interactive, Inc.
Featured Project: 
A partner since 2009, The Arnold Group is a human resource company. We had the privilege of designing their website which runs on the FlipperSD™ CMS platform. Recently, they visited our team and received free FlipperSD™ training. The Arnold Group team learned how to utilize the new FlipperSD™ features and we were able to help them find a better solution for their blog page layout.
Based on their input, we redesigned the blog layout to address how articles should be categorized. Tags were assigned to each category. These tags are enhanced by the SEO module built within FlipperSD™. Visitors coming to their website are able to search the blog articles by section and print as needed.
Featured Project: 
KIS Backgrounds LLC is a new partner. Their company runs background checks for their clients. They wanted an easy-to-use, secure content management system.
KIS Backgrounds was able to get their new site up and running in just one week using FlipperSD™’s pre-built mobile responsive templates. Since SEO (search engine optimization) is a key factor to expanding their business online, they also utilized FlipperSD™'s SEO Maximizer tool to increase their online awareness. Changes to their site are now made with ease, without having to keep track of plugins or theme updates.
To view the website they created, visit https://www.kisbackgrounds.com