Filed from St. Louis · 04.2026
Two of us.
One city.
The work.
A small St. Louis studio. Personally handled, here.
We make the websites here. Run the campaigns here. Pick up the phone — actually pick it up. If you're a St. Louis owner who wants the work done by the same person who answers your emails, we'd like to talk.
A letter from the owner.
We started River City Digital because we got tired of watching local owners pay national shops for templates and call summaries. Sites built somewhere else, by people who'd never been to Soulard or driven Manchester at 5pm. Reports written by automated tools and forwarded by an account manager nobody had met.
We thought there was a different way. Make the websites here. Run the campaigns here. Pick up the phone — actually pick it up. Treat each business like it's the only one we're working with that week, because functionally, it is.
Every site we ship gets hand-coded. Every audit gets run by a person, not a tool. Every month, the report you get is something we wrote, not something a dashboard exported. If that sounds slower than the typical agency pitch — it is. It also tends to work.
We're a small studio. We won't be a fit for everyone. If you're a St. Louis owner who wants the work done by the same person who answers your emails, we'd like to talk.
The studio
Where the work gets made.
A small space in St. Louis. A window, a desk, books, coffee. The usual.
The shelf
What we read. What we use.
A short list of the things that shape how we work. Mostly underlined, occasionally argued with.
What we read
- The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & Thomas
- Refactoring UI — Wathan & Schoger
- The Brand Gap — Marty Neumeier
- Building a StoryBrand — Donald Miller
- The St. Louis Post-Dispatch · daily
- Search Engine Land · Search Engine Journal
- Anything by Rand Fishkin
What we use
- Next.js · Vercel · Resend
- Figma · Linear · Notion
- Google Search Console · Looker Studio
- BrightLocal · SE Ranking
- Klaviyo · Mailchimp · SendGrid
- iA Writer · Sublime Text
- Cherokee Street Coffee & Sump
The standard
What ‘good work’ means here.
- The work is the deliverable.Not the deck. Not the meeting. The site, the campaign, the audit, the schema — that's what you're paying for, and that's what we ship.
- Speed is part of the brief. A slow site is a broken site. Every page we ship targets sub-1.2s LCP.
- Accessibility is the spec, not a checkbox. WCAG 2.1 AA on every page, every build, no exceptions.
- If we can't explain it in plain English, we don't understand it well enough to ship it. That includes schema, ad strategy, and the Map Pack.
- We answer emails the same day.Usually within an hour. If we're heads-down on a build, we'll tell you when to expect a real reply.
- We say no when we should.If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you and try to point you somewhere that is.
If we're a fit
The only way to find out is to talk.
A 30-minute call. Real conversation. We tell you whether we can help, and if not, who can.