Girls Are Smarter, Inc. is a privately held consulting company specialising in Internet development for media, publishing and community based organisations. It is run and operated by Laura Laytham who previously served as the Director of Website Operations Strategy for Akamai Technologies, the Director of Product & Technology for Golf Channel Digital, VP of Product Development for ARTISTdirect and Total Beauty, and as Director of Technology for Seventeen Magazine, gURL.com and Teen Magazine. She also administered and built technology to automate the publishing of 52 weekly community newspaper editions for Gazette Newspapers, a subsidiary of the Washington Post and served on the core development teams at Delias and the Department of Education. More recently she revamped Gesher Galicia’s genealogy search indexing tools using Apache Solr, soundex and more.
While New York based since its inception in 2001, Girls Are Smarter relocated to Los Angeles in 2005 then to Orlando, Florida in the summer of 2014. Girls Are Smarter services clients from around the world. Laura also partners with Devon Dudgeon West of Devon Inspiration in San Francisco, to offer clients digital marketing solutions, and with Thomas Seltzer of Seltzer Design Studios in New York on projects that require a more deft UI and design hand.
To view a list of recent clients and projects, please visit the “clients” section of our site.
Girls Are Smarter programs primarily on open-source UNIX operating systems and specialises in LAMP and WordPress development. Laura builds and supports all shapes and sizes of content management systems, complex database applications, broadcast email messaging, social application development (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest/etc), and Website development for traditional, tablet and mobile browsers. She has over two decades worth of experience building, supporting and managing all varieties and levels of these applications. She’s also worked intimately and in-depth with community tools like bulletin board systems, interactive games, blogs and user registrations systems and has helped launch successful large-scale online marketing campaigns, award show balloting (for the Teen Choice Awards), e-commerce sites and other kinds of innovative business applications. In addition she also has multimedia experience, converting and building video and audio content. In the past few years Laura has also invested a lot of time in genealogical programming, working with Gesher Galicia to use Apache Solr to make thousands of vital records available via their All Galicia Database (search.geshergalicia.org).
All of Laura’s experience, focused mainly on media, publishing and community organisations, places Girls Are Smarter at a distinct advantage in understanding how to communicate with and meet the needs of clients in these specific markets. She builds large-scale, influential digital media products. In addition, Laura’s background in journalism (she graduated from N.Y.U. with a degree in journalism and has published on a freelance basis) and her film studies degrees (she also has a B.A. and Masters in cinema studies from N.Y.U.) puts her clearly above the fold of typical technology consultants. She knows how to communicate, how to plan and how to execute in a variety of challenging environments.
It’s not just about building smarter applications but about working smarter with the people involved.
For more information, please feel free to contact Laura directly.