About Kootenai Valley Digital
Hi, I’m Chris Balboni and I’m the owner of Kootenai Valley Digital.
Computers have been a passion of mine ever since I was a kid. Growing up surrounded by national forest in Troy, Montana, I spent a lot of time outdoors (and still do), but when I wasn’t outside I was usually fixated on my family’s PC. I built my first website when I was 12, learned basic coding and design principles with the very first version of WordPress in the early 2000s, and dove into networking and hardware courses just as high speed internet finally came to our town. There really hasn’t been a time in the last twenty-five years where I haven’t been running websites, it’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing.
I’ve loved being behind a camera for nearly as long as I’ve been doing web design, which took me to Montana State University where I graduated with a B.A. in Film & Photography (and, more importantly, met my partner Sarah). Working as a self-reliant filmmaker around the country in the years that followed, I found gigs by marketing myself online with a website I customized from scratch. When media work was slow I leaned on my web design skills, and eventually that turned into a job as a full-stack web developer for the decade that followed.
As web design has evolved in recent years to accommodate audiences using a wide variety of devices including phones and tablets, I’ve found that businesses in rural areas like Troy have struggled to keep up online. Places I regularly visit have let their websites fall into disrepair or disappear completely because it’s too much work for owners to manage themselves, too difficult to find someone nearby that’s reliable, and too expensive to hire a design agency from a nearby city. That’s why, in 2024, I started Kootenai Valley Digital, with the goal of helping locals modernize their web presence as well as providing trustworthy, reliable web design to clients around the country.