Best Web Design in Mountain View, CA (2026)

Web Design for Mountain View, California

Mountain View is a Santa Clara County city on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It went from Ohlone land and a 19th-century stagecoach and fruit-shipping stop to a cornerstone of the tech industry, home to Google's headquarters and the Computer History Museum. It is where William Shockley opened the region's first silicon-device lab in 1956, seeding what became Silicon Valley.

AppWT works with Mountain View, CA businesses from Livonia, Michigan, mostly online and travelling as needed.

About Mountain View

Also known as. Birthplace of Silicon Valley (epithet tied to the 1956 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor). The city is named literally for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

History. Home to the Ohlone people; the area was part of the 1842 Mexican land grant Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas. Settled in 1852 as a stagecoach station on the road between San Francisco and San Jose, becoming a shipping point for fruit and grain and a center of religious book publishing in the early 1900s. Incorporated as a city in 1902 with roughly 600 residents. Moffett Field Naval Air Station operated nearby from 1929 to 1994; the NACA (now NASA) Ames Research Center was established in 1940. In 1956 William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory here, the first company to work on silicon semiconductor devices in the valley; employees who left ('the traitorous eight') founded Fairchild Semiconductor, spawning hundreds of chip firms.

Local economy. Technology is the foundation of the local economy; Google/Alphabet is headquartered at the Googleplex and is by far the largest employer (roughly 23,000 workers). Other major employers and headquarters include Intuit, LinkedIn, Waymo, a large Microsoft campus, 23andMe, Synopsys, Samsung, and El Camino Hospital. NASA Ames Research Center is a major federal research presence adjacent to the city. The early-1900s economy centered on fruit and grain shipping and religious book publishing (Pacific Press).

Culture and community. The Mountain View Art & Wine Festival, a free two-day event on pedestrianized Castro Street each September. Castro Street downtown is a lively, partly car-free dining and nightlife corridor running from the Caltrain station. Shoreline Amphitheatre hosts major touring concerts and festivals. Chez TJ is a long-running Michelin-starred restaurant. TheatreWorks and Peninsula Youth Theatre perform locally, along with the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.

What makes Mountain View distinct. Shoreline Amphitheatre sits on an old San Francisco landfill; at an early Steve Winwood concert a fan's cigarette lighter ignited methane leaking from the landfill beneath the venue. Promoter Bill Graham designed Shoreline to resemble the Grateful Dead's 'Steal Your Face' skull logo; the Dead played there about 39 times, ending with their final appearance on June 4, 1995. The city contains seven EPA Superfund sites tied to decades of semiconductor manufacturing. Its sister cities are Iwata, Japan and Hasselt, Belgium. High living costs produced a well-documented population of working residents living in RVs parked on city streets.

Small unincorporated community in central Contra Costa County, next to the city of Martinez and near Vine Hill and Pacheco

Mountain View Landmarks and Local Life

• Computer History Museum - the world's largest museum devoted to the history of computing
• The Googleplex and the adjacent Android statue lawn - with sculptures of past Android OS versions (Ice Cream Sandwich, Lollipop, and more)
• Shoreline Amphitheatre and Shoreline Park - built atop a former landfill
• NASA Ames Research Center and Moffett Field - home to the enormous Hangar One
• Mountain View Public Library - which displays a section of the Berlin Wall
• Stevens Creek Trail - a paved pedestrian and bicycle path

Mountain View at a Glance

U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2023.

• Median household income: About $84,818
• Adults with a bachelor degree or higher: About 34%
• Housing: About 66% of housing units are owner-occupied
• Housing: Roughly 76% of homes are single-family detached houses