More than 20 years...

We met through Wolfgang Burkart, founder of the Lhalleschen uchs cinema, who was participating in an entrepreneurship training with Christiane. Winfried was also taking part in such a course with a different education provider. This shared goal of creating websites for clients quickly united us.

There was a sense of pioneering spirit, and new, previously unknown professions emerged. For example, multimedia developer, a role Winfried, originally a chemistry student, further trained for. He discovered his love for computers during this time.

At the same time, Christiane was helping to turn former female chemists into multimedia developers in a modern computer lab in Wolfen. She quickly realized that some of the women preferred cooking over pixeling, even though they sat in front of brand-new Macintosh computers. Not everyone found access to the new working tools.

This experience was the starting shot for Christiane's freelance work as an instructor in vocational training. She trained unemployed people as web designers for several years with various educational providers. A new market was enticing with the hope of getting many people into new professions. However, this market proved to fall short of expectations, as later became clear.

With lots of enthusiasm and joy, work took off. Projects she had once painted with brushes and colors at art school were now magically created by participants using digital means in a fraction of the time!

Note: Design rules always apply, whether with brush and paper or mouse and Photoshop!

Meanwhile, Christiane supervised her first clients and, as was customary at the time, built static websites manually. By night, she built websites for her first clients, and by day, she taught her participants HTML. Each participant built their own website, with freshly gained practical knowledge!

From the early web projects of the two freelancers, the lilac-media-GbR was founded in 2002. By the way, "lilac" is the English word for "Flieder" (lilac).

Soon, the newly founded GbR had to ramp up work for clients quite unexpectedly. Because by 2004, the training and teaching activities came to an abrupt halt. The market was flooded with new web designers, but very few found work. So, it was fortunate to have two main pillars. We overcame this crisis together, now also as a couple privately.

Technologies came and went. Who still remembers Frames or Flash? What worked well for a while disappeared later as if it had never existed. The challenge was to recognize current trends, adopt new techniques, and adapt our work to ever-changing viewing habits and technical conditions. This has remained unchanged to this day.

The era of Content Management Systems (CMS) began. We integrated our first client's news module into their static websites, allowing them to publish news themselves. This marked the beginning of lilac-CMS.

For our own programming system, we set up our first web server with support from the Halle-based company connectline. This server still hosts all client projects today.

From the initial homepage modules, our own system developed into the lilac-framework and lilac-CMS. Increasingly, administrative tasks were also handled with these tools.

In 2005, the first website was fully realized with the lilac-CMS.

In 2006, we extended the lilac-framework with a quotation and an order module – another building block for our own agency management.

In 2007, we registered lilac® as a brand with the German Patent and Trademark Office.

As our customer base grew, tasks became more complex. For example, in 2009, we developed our own ticket system to manage all tasks to this day. This ticket system is another important component of digitizing our business processes.

Since 2015, Oliver Steinbach has brought fresh energy to the team and the web projects as a full-time employee.

Since then, we've successfully transitioned to responsive, device-independent websites and prioritized data protection.

In June 2018, Winfried Flieder left the company to take a full-time position at the newly founded online marketing agency Webfindling UG (limited). The GbR continued under the name lilac-media Ch. Schenke & Partner GbR.

Since July 2019, Winfried Flieder has been a partner again in the GbR.