After 20 Years of Building Sarasota’s Digital Backbone, Sande Caplin & Associates Launches a New Home Online

If you’ve eaten at a waterfront restaurant in Cortez, attended the Sarasota Film Festival, or donated to a local charity in the past two decades, there’s a decent chance Sande Caplin had something to do with the website you visited first.

Since founding Sande Caplin & Associates more than 20 years ago, the Sarasota-Bradenton-based digital firm has quietly become one of the Suncoast’s most prolific web design and marketing shops — not through flashy self-promotion, but through the kind of long-term relationships that only happen when you actually show up. For clients. For causes. For community.

Now, the company has launched a redesigned website at www.sandecaplin.com — and it’s as much a milestone marker as it is a fresh coat of paint.

The Clients That Became Friends

Ask Sande about his business and he won’t start with a services list. He’ll tell you about the people.

There’s Kris at CAI West Florida — the Community Associations Institute chapter serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties — where the team has handled multiple projects for  her across different industries over the years. There’s the Sarasota Film Festival, whose website SCA has built and managed for over a decade, and which will debut an entirely new platform built on modern technology in time for the 2026 festival in April. There are the restaurants — too many to name, though Sande has tried, one dinner at a time — where being a regular and being the web guy are basically the same thing.

Many of these relationships stretch back 10, 15, even 20 years. In an industry where agencies churn through clients like quarterly reports, that kind of loyalty says something.

More Than Websites

What separates SCA from a typical web shop is how often the work extends beyond the screen.

When Hurricane Melissa devastated communities across Jamaica in 2025, a group of local Sarasota business people — Sande among them — organized United for Relief, a two-day reggae benefit concert at the Sarasota Fairgrounds. SCA donated the website.

Closer to home, Sande has become a surrogate grandparent to Charlee and Nova, two young girls who lost their mother in a tragic drunk driving accident in 2024. He takes the girls out every week — Chuck E. Cheese, the Swordfish Grill dock to look for fish, epic games of hide-and-seek at Sande’s house. Last year, SCA helped organize the annual “Giving Back” event to raise money for the girls’ education fund, hosted at Swordfish Grill and Tiki with a cap of 200 tickets and every dollar going to their Florida 529 accounts.

That’s not a line item on a services page. That’s just who the guy is.

The Pizza Article That Started Something

And then there’s The Suncoast Post itself — the community news site Sande has nurtured for years into a go-to source for local Sarasota-Bradenton stories. It started, as these things sometimes do, with pizza. Specifically, an article about the best pizza in Sarasota — one of the first stories ever published on the site. From that single slice of content, The Suncoast Post grew into a platform covering local arts, dining, events, charities, and the people who make the Suncoast what it is.

What’s New (and What’s Next)

The redesigned sandecaplin.com reflects how the business has evolved. Web design and WordPress management are still the foundation, but the firm now offers SEO, Google Ads management, social media strategy, branding, and — increasingly — AI consulting for small businesses trying to make sense of a technology that changes faster than most people can keep up with.

It’s that last piece that signals where SCA is headed. The company has started helping local businesses integrate AI tools into their workflows: chatbots that capture leads after hours, automated reporting, content assistance, and practical training sessions designed for business owners who don’t have a computer science degree.

The Sarasota Film Festival’s upcoming site rebuild is a good example of the shift. Built on a modern tech stack — Node.js, Vercel, Supabase — it represents the kind of technical evolution happening behind the scenes at SCA, even as the front-of-house philosophy stays the same: build something that works, make it look great, and stick around to help.

20 Years, and Counting

Two decades is a long time in any business. In tech, it’s practically geological. Platforms rise and fall. Algorithms change overnight. The tools Sande used to build his first client sites don’t even exist anymore.

What hasn’t changed is the approach: show up, do good work, be part of the community you serve. The new website at www.sandecaplin.com is a reflection of that — not a corporate brochure, but a door into a business that’s been woven into the Suncoast for over 20 years and isn’t going anywhere.

Sande Caplin is the founder of Sande Caplin & Associates, a full-service web design and digital marketing firm based in Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida with virtual offices in Brooklyn, NY, St. James, NY, Los Cabos, Mexico, Denver, CO and Sparta, TN. He can be reached at 941-347-4500 or through sandecaplin.com.