About Soka Websites
Our Team
We are a two person website building company. We're both professionally trained, with years of experience in all aspects of website development, from project management to design and programming.
Direct communication, better results
When you work with us, the person you talk to is the person building your site. There's no communication gap between you and the developer, no game of telephone where your needs get misunderstood or diluted. We do all the work ourselves, without subcontracting or offshoring projects to other developers.
Sarah Burt Howell
Site Builder, Site Architect, Content
Sarah is an Icon-level Wix Studio website developer who has been building websites since 1994. Sarah is the primary builder at Soka Websites. She brings experience working HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SQL, Access, ColdFusion, and JSON. She holds certifications in JavaScript, Systems Analysis, and Project Management, and has written website content and marketing copy for a wide range of industries. She also works with Photoshop, Sora and Midjourney.
Sarah has published fiction, nonfiction, and a one-act play. She likes to relax by practicing qigong in the garden.
Jennifer Donahue
UI/UX, Design, eCommerce
Jen spent two decades in tech including working at Amazon and Microsoft before studying website design and development at Seattle Central College. She began building webpages at Amazon with basic HTML and websites on the Microsoft intranet and later spent about a decade working with WordPress. At Soka, Jennifer works in the support roles of billing, quality control, and project management..
Jen enjoys reading, photographing sunsets, and playing ping-pong with her family at the park.
Together, we are Soka Websites. We each bring a long history of working with websites, databases, and content. We approach each new project with curiosity and a commitment to excellence.
Our Philosophy
A robust website is a sign that a business is operating at its full potential. A weak or missing site can signal that important things are being left undone. We help close that gap by building world-class websites that reflect the excellence of the businesses behind them.
Soka means "I see, I understand" in Japanese, and we believe that phrase reflects the fundamental purpose of a website. They help people see us and understand what we offer.
Our History
Soka Websites' roots go back to Sarah's first company, Third Wave Media (TWM), which was among the first professional website companies in Seattle. TWM was founded in early 1994, just two months after Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. Our first client hadn't even seen a website before hiring us to build one. He commissioned a website for his chain of computer repair stores after hearing about the concept from a friend in San Francisco.
At that time, most people got their email from closed services like AOL or CompuServe, which offered curated, hyperlinked content that was walled off from the actual web. Fewer than 3% of U.S. households had internet access, and even fewer had used a web browser. To reach the open web, you needed a dial-up modem, a TCP/IP connection, and a standalone application like Mosaic.
For more than two decades, TWM’s clients came through referrals and recommendations, and the company evolved alongside the internet itself, through HTML, CSS, JavaScript, database-driven sites, and AI.
When Jennifer joined Sarah in 2014, we built WordPress sites until we switched to Wix Editor in 2022. We began working with Wix Studio in August of 2023.
We’ve worked through every phase of the web. We’ve led teams, worked solo, and also subcontracted for larger companies developing enterprise platforms. We've replaced broken systems with future-ready platforms, and served clients across manufacturing, eCommerce, education, law, organized religion, aerospace, hospitality, and adventure travel.
Each new project begins with a fresh mind.
