My broad business background allows me to understand your business and design a custom website that integrates with it. The website should expand your business not bend it.
These days there are a great many tools, from templates to drag-and-drop page editors, that allow almost anyone to build a website. It is fairly easy to get a basic website up on the web. I had previously typed “up and running” on the web, but that word “running” is pretty subjective. There are, of course, a great many sites that were built that way. Business is being done on those simple sites. The trouble can come in two ways. First, a site built from a template is rigid and business processes have to be bent to fit the way that the site works. Second, a simple site looks good, and works to an extent, but if something goes wrong, the template-dependent designer can’t fix it if the site is broken or hacked.
Ready made templates have prebuilt structures. Often that structure was made for another business, potentially in some completely unrelated industry, and then copied and made available as an outline. The website functions in the way that it was designed, but your business process has to be changed to fit the template. A custom built website is started from scratch, of course, and that means that from the very beginning every design decision, every structure or form is built around your process. I build custom websites that integrate with the way you are already doing business. These integrated sites are able to compliment and expand what you are doing rather than limiting how you can do it.
In the process of polishing up some old skills, I joined a private online community dedicated to WordPress excellence. I have taken a series of courses within that group. In addition to being able to build a custom website from scratch, I have studied the internal structure of WordPress itself. Almost anything is possible just a few layers deeper than the template and the stock photos. Moreover, that community is literally hundreds of web designers helping each other to better serve our clients.
Recently, I was able to help a client change the way we thought she was going to take orders on her site. Originally, we were setting up the e-commerce side of her website with a very popular WordPress plugin called WooCommerce. Woo works great with WordPress and is a well integrated structure for selling products online. However, my client is a super creative, artistic solopreneur who makes beautiful custom decorated cookies and other baked goods. She is often supplying treats for events like weddings, graduations, and meetings etc. Basic WooCommerce without expensive add-ons would have allowed a customer to place an order of any size for a particular date, pay for it, and then expect it to happen without fail. My client would have had no control over her schedule or workload. Nobody would have been happy; especially in a busy time like the holidays or graduation season. I helped her to develop a custom process using Google Forms embedded in her site. The customer submits a proposed order with complete details about the cookies, quantities, design, and date. My client is able to review her calendar, quote a price, and commit to a date with complete control.
Let’s talk about integrating and improving your web presence to make your business even more successful.
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