About Dustin Lifford
I'm Dustin Lifford. I help Tri-Cities organizations turn complicated information and repetitive work into useful systems. I bring more than 20 years of web development and the discipline of intelligence analysis to every project.
Three disciplines, one standard across all of them. The work has to hold up.
Every claim needs a source. You get recommendations with the reasoning attached, and gaps named instead of papered over.
Twenty-plus years of production work means what gets built runs in the tools you already use, not just in a demo.
AI goes where it saves time, and a person reviews anything where the stakes are real.
One current project and two from the web years. Past work is labeled as past work.
Tri-Cities AI Lab, current
Six Rivers Media, 2012 to 2025
City of Kingsport, past work
Same three steps whether the job is a website, an automation, or an AI tool.
Start with how the work actually happens today, who touches it, and what it costs when it goes wrong. No tool gets picked before that.
Build against your real tools and real data, sized to the problem. Sometimes the useful thing is a spreadsheet. That's allowed.
Test it against real cases before it goes live, document what it does, and say plainly where it still needs a person.
I grew up in the Tri-Cities rebuilding hand-me-down PCs from spare parts, which is still roughly the job, just with better parts. By high school I was fixing other people's computers. I ran a PC repair shop during the web directory era, then spent thirteen years running the websites for the region's newspapers.
I also write about the region's technology history at dustinlifford.com, from the first local domains to the BBS boards the Tri-Cities used before the web.
If you'd rather meet in person, we can. When you call, I answer the phone.
A+ and MCSE certifications and hardware work starting in high school, before the web was how anyone found a local business.
Ran a PC repair shop during the web directory era. Built a first paid website around 2002, in HTML and frames, for a walk-in client, and submitted client sites to the Yahoo Directory and a local Tri-Cities directory.
Work-from-home Apple technical support, then website building and SEO at scale through a Colombia-based web shop. High volume, tight deadlines, and an early education in what search engines actually reward.
Director of Digital and Web Development at Six Rivers Media. Ran the websites for the Kingsport Times News, Johnson City Press, and two weekly papers, plus more than 100 local sites, moving from an in-house custom CMS to Libercus (around 2014), then TownNews/BLOX (around 2018, redesigned around 2021), then mynews360/Presteligence (2025). That's three platform migrations and a major redesign. Also Director of Programming and Development for The Net360, the company's web consulting division, from 2013 to 2021.
WordPress, CMS, and SEO classes for newsroom and sales staff, instruction for professors at Mountain Empire Community College, and helped develop Northeast State's web design curriculum through the DACUM process.
Stepped away from the director role at Six Rivers Media. Continues supporting select digital projects there as an independent contractor.
Open-source intelligence work at Barrister Intelligence, supporting law firms that need research that holds up under scrutiny. Founder of Tri-Cities AI Lab, building AI strategy, automation, and AI search visibility work for businesses across Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. Writes regularly at From the Lab.
Fifteen minutes, no pitch deck. Tell me what's slowing you down, and I'll tell you plainly whether I'm the right person to help.
The menu lives down here now. Closer to your thumb.
