Two Dayton bicycle mechanics engineered the airplane — then had to leave Ohio to fly it
- The Wright brothers designed and built the 1903 Flyer in their Dayton shop
- Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is Ohio’s largest single-site employer
- Procter & Gamble has run from Cincinnati since 1837
- The Buckeye State, birthplace of 7 US presidents
How Ohio’s digital economy grew
Ohio becomes the 17th state
Admitted March 1 — though Congress didn’t pass a formal admission resolution until a retroactive fix in 1953.
Birthplace of aviation, precisely
The Wrights were lifelong Dayton residents and self-taught engineers; every hour of design work, including the 1901 wind-tunnel tests that cracked airfoil physics, happened in their Dayton bicycle shop. The flight itself happened nearly 600 miles away, on the dunes outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, because the Wrights needed reliable wind and open sand, not because Ohio had any role in the flying. Ohio license plates say "Birthplace of Aviation"; North Carolina’s say "First in Flight" — two different, both true claims about two different places.
Their real test field, Huffman Prairie outside Dayton, now sits inside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio’s largest single-site employer at around 38,000 military, civilian and contractor personnel — headquarters for the Air Force Research Laboratory and home to the National Museum of the US Air Force, the world’s largest military aviation museum.
A Cincinnati soap shop, 185 years later
Founded in 1837 by two brothers-in-law who’d married sisters, P&G launched Ivory Soap in 1879 and is credited with inventing the modern "brand manager" role via a 1931 internal memo that’s still cited as the origin of the practice industry-wide. It’s still headquartered in Cincinnati today — $84.28 billion in FY2025 revenue, around 109,000 employees worldwide.
How Ohio businesses buy websites
The aerospace base and P&G get the headlines, but most of Ohio’s businesses are the trades and shops serving Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and towns across the rest of the state.
Trades and home services
Ohio’s major cities are spread across the state — say plainly which one you actually serve.
Professional and B2B services
A manufacturing and consumer-goods economy rewards clarity about exactly what you do.
Shops and hospitality
Clear hours and location, readable on a phone, win the quick local search.
How well do you know Ohio’s digital economy?
3 quick questions. Get all 3 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.
Ohio quiz · 1 of 3
The Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop and did their aeronautical engineering in which Ohio city?
Why FastSites works here
A state that engineered flight itself understands the value of getting the fundamentals right before showing the world. A clear one-page site, live in days, at a published price, brings that same discipline to a small business.