Since its operations began eight years ago, Affinety Solutions, Inc. has been making a name for itself when it comes to website management.

Born out of a consulting firm and founded by brothers Steve and Joe Holewa, the Minnesota-based Affinety Solutions works to provide its clients with individualized website design.  Clients can “self-maintain and self-manage” their own sites, choose a unique design and layout, and receive search engine optimization.

“Competitors out there will offer you a template, and you can have it in blue, red or yellow,” said Steve Holewa, who is responsible for day-to-day operations.  “So you go from district to district, and while (these websites) look great and they can deploy in a day, but they … look like the next guy down the road.”

Affinety Solutions provides innovative web content delivery and management tools to more than one hundred schools across the nation. The company’s platform is designed so that an average, non-technical person can create a website, publish content, manage information and conduct information through that site.

Clients can add standard snap-ons to their site as needed. These include calendars, newsletters, guest registration, and blogs and discussion forums, among many others.

“Schools don’t want to look the same. They’re in different parts of the state, with different residents. What’s good in Detroit may not be good in Kalamazoo,” Holewa said.

One exciting feature provided by Affinety is search engine optimization through Google. When Google indexes pages, or crawls, it does so by categorizing information. When Google finds Affinety websites, the software gives them very specific information back to Google so it is placed higher on the search results. So, if your school uses Affinety Solutions software to manage its website, and you do a Google search for the school, it is guaranteed to come up on the first search page.

In addition to providing features that make every website unique, Affinety Solutions ensures these features keep working by conducting technology upgrades, security scans and data backups every 15 minutes.

“We focus on the industry and really get to know the industry,” Holewa said. “We plow back about 20 percent of our revenue into just researching things. (We’re) looking at doing things faster, and less expensively.”

Affinety Solutions is also close to putting out a new feature that would make creating and managing a website even easier. If a client wants to add a new page to their website, they can simply look at a thumbnail popup to see what the page would look like.

“We’ve created about 18 different page layout templates, so people can look at them, click on them, and the pieces and parts are already formatted on the page,” Holewa said. “It makes it quicker and faster.”
Holewa said that new feature should be rolling out soon.