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We’ve been at this since websites were the whole job.
Red Iron New Media started in 2006 doing what everyone needed then: websites. We’re still here because we never stopped listening when clients said “okay, but could you also…”
Where This Started
A phone that rang when somebody’s website was down.
We didn’t start with a manifesto. We started with a phone that rang when somebody’s website was down, and the belief that if you do good work and answer that phone, the rest sorts itself out.
The early years were websites — hand-built, one at a time, for businesses that were mostly just trying to prove they existed online. It wasn’t glamorous. It was, however, an education. Because when you build the website, you end up learning the business behind it: how orders come in, where the paperwork goes, which spreadsheet the whole company secretly runs on.
That education turned out to be the actual business.
The Evolution
How websites became everything else.
Nobody woke up one day and decided to become a technology partner. Our clients decided it for us, one request at a time.
The website needed a store. The store needed to talk to inventory. Inventory needed to talk to accounting. Somebody asked if we could automate the thing their office manager did by hand every Friday. Somebody else asked if we could make two systems talk that were never designed to meet. Twenty years of “could you also” adds up to a company that does a great deal more than websites — without ever having pivoted, rebranded, or reinvented itself.
We just kept saying yes to harder problems.
About “New Media”
We debated changing the name. Then everything became new again.
We’ll be honest: there was a stretch when the name felt dated. “New media” was what people called websites in 2006, and for a while we debated changing it.
So the name stays. Partly out of stubbornness, mostly because it turned out to be true twice. We were there when the web was new. We’re here now that intelligence is. Both times, the job was the same: figure out what the technology is actually good for, and put it to work inside real businesses.
The Honest Version
What we actually are — and aren’t.
What we are
A small, senior team. When you call, you talk to the people doing the work — there’s no account layer translating your problem into a ticket. Richard Thomas founded the company in 2006 and has been in the room since day one.
What we sell isn’t code. It’s the twenty years of sitting inside businesses that comes with it — knowing why the odd workflow exists, which system is the source of truth, which “temporary” fix quietly became mission-critical.
Our clients tend to stay. Ten years, fifteen years — long enough that the relationship outlives the technology it started on. We consider that the whole point.
What we’re not
We’re not the biggest shop you can hire, and we’re not trying to be. We don’t have a sales team, a foosball loft, or a process named after a fruit. We won’t staff your project with whoever’s on the bench, because we don’t have a bench.
We also won’t tell you AI when the answer is a spreadsheet, or custom software when the answer is something off the shelf. Some of the most valuable advice we give is “don’t build that.”
It costs us work in the short term. It’s why people are still calling twenty years later.
For the Mad Men.
A word to the agencies: we know you, because we’ve spent twenty years working alongside you. Creative shops, ad agencies, marketing firms — the Mad Men of the world — have long used us as the technical team behind the curtain. You sell the vision; we make the CRM integration actually work.
We’re comfortable in that role. White-label when you need it, on the client call when you want us there, and never — ever — circling your account. Your client stays your client. We’ve kept those arrangements for over a decade with some shops, which tells you how we treat them.
If you’ve got a pitch that needs technical firepower behind it, or a client request your team can’t build, that’s a conversation we’ve had a hundred times. Bring it.
Where AI Fits
The tool changes. The judgment doesn’t.
We use AI heavily — it makes experienced architects dramatically faster, and pretending otherwise would be silly. But we’ve watched enough technology waves to know the pattern: the tool changes, the judgment doesn’t.
AI can generate code. It can’t know that your warehouse software can’t be replaced, or that the CSV export before payroll is load-bearing. That part is still us.
Technology gets smarter every year. Relationships compound over decades.
Where We Work
Rooted in Alabama. Not fenced in by it.
We’re Alabama born and based, and it shows — in the client list (Roll Tide), in how we do business, and in the fact that a handshake still means something here.
But the work has never respected state lines. From this home base we’ve served clients across the country and, on more than a few occasions, around the world — everyone from single-location local businesses to Fortune 500 companies, top-25 cancer centers, multi-billion-dollar manufacturers, Big Tech, and one memorable gubernatorial campaign.
If it made our list, it was significant — ask us about any of it.
Start a Conversation
Not another vendor. A partner who understands how your business actually works.
Tell us the problem — the manual process, the disconnected systems, the platform that’s outgrown itself. We’ll tell you honestly what we’d do about it.