est. 2003 · Menasha, WI
est. 2003 · Menasha, WI
The reconstruction
Ashwood, Inc. closed its hosting in 2005, and for years the company lived on only as a few cold links in the back of someone's email. This page is the story of putting it back together.
In the early 2000s, Jamie Dolan opened a small printing, design and marketing company in a stone building on the corner in Menasha, Wisconsin. Its sign said Visual Communication Provider; its pitch was that it didn't sell printing, it solved problems. It ran offset and digital presses, a bindery, a mailing operation, and a handful of mail-order products — Amazing Postcards, PostCardLeads.com, and the cheerfully overconfident 300% Guarantee. By 2005 the hosting was switched off and the site went dark.
Almost everything that mattered. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had quietly crawled ashwoodinc.com across 2003–2005, and 823 files came back intact: the home page and the President's letter, the services and mission pages, the news room and the December 2003 press release (as a real PDF), the Amazing Postcards and PostCardLeads pitches, Jamie's personal marketing-consultant pages, and the Y2WebBuilder storefront behind it all. Those pages were rebuilt here — some faithfully recreated in their original 2003 layout, some retypeset for a modern screen.
Not everything survives a crawl. The home page's original Flash splash banner
(splash.swf), the header graphic, and a couple of decorative movies were never captured, and
they're gone for good. A few stock photos that rode along with the sales letters didn't make it either.
For a while, the missing banner was the one nagging hole in the whole project.
Then the photo box turned up — dozens of pictures the web never had. The stone storefront with the blue steel roof. The pole sign reading Call 725-6000 · Visit Us Online. The A.B. Dick press opened up for a wash. The product roadmap scrawled across a whiteboard. And Akiva, the shop dog, riding a hand truck in a U.S. Postal Service tub. Those photographs did what the archive couldn't: they brought back the place. You'll find them throughout this site and gathered in the gallery.
None of this would exist without the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has been quietly saving the web for everyone since 1996. If a twenty-year-old print shop in Menasha can be pulled back out of the dark, so can a lot of things worth keeping. If you can, send them a few dollars — it's a good cause.
This is a tribute site. Ashwood, Inc. is no longer in operation, and the phone numbers, e-mail addresses and prices reproduced here are kept only for the historical record.