Landscapers are not busy with their outdoor work from mid November til about the 2nd week of March, so that is when they take that time to focus on their marketing and promotional efforts. This means finally getting that Landscaping or Lawn Care website up and running, or for some clients refreshing the look and feel of what they already have out there. So from the start of the year til about mid-April, we are SLAMMED with work. Not complaining!
Jeff, our new accounting manager, and Sarah, our newest developer, are integrating into the workflow nicely. One really awesome thing that has happened, is that Jeff has gotten Dreamweaver set up on his machine, and has already done a few simple code level changes to some sites. Sarah has been up in the code since day one, and is learning her way around our standard code set pretty well. She got on board right when we are at the moment where a lot of our existing customers want SEO services, so I have been trying to train her in the fine art of search engine gangsterization (of the white hat variety). She seems to be catching on well, and shoud be able to pass on the knowledge to Jeff.
Bill continues to rock the living crap out of some back end code! We work well as a team because he gravitates towards more complex programming issues, while I tend to concentrate on pixel perfect front end HTML and CSS. So we are constantly helping each other out.
My continuing goal is to improve the product, the search engine visibility of our sites, and the processes we use to generate the product/customer experience.
The addition of the new team members, and the fact that they can all do at least some work at the code level as opposed to just using the website admin tool means that the workload has been split in such a way that Chris can focus more on making changes and upgrades to our CMS, and he has already rolled out some stages of what I am calling WebsiteAdmin 3.0! Users will have more control of the look of their editable pages, and there will also be a new improved user editable Product Catalog feature, which is something that a lot of our customers have asked for.
We have launched some new sites including Sprinkler Systems of Germantown TN, Reliable Lawn Care Today of White House TN, B & K Systems Irrigation, Drainage & Lighting of Brandon MS, and Koch Landscape Services of Hondo TX.
Locally, we launched Tender Lawn Care of Cumming GA.
An exceptionally fun site for me to construct and launch is Nature Coast Tree Farm of Bell, FL. They opted to NOT have a photo gallery, and instead had us construct customized Flash headers for the various pages of the site, that rotate through pertinent images. It was a lot of work, but the payoff is really nice.
Another challenging site to build and launch was Greenthumb Nursery of Ether NC. This site was actually designed by a third party, and we applied their design to our back end code. There are still a few areas we are going to refine, but we went ahead with the launch so they could start acquiring some search visibility.
Whew, we have been BUSY huh?
As we continue to upgrade the product, something I am hoping we can revamp is our Portfolio/Photo Gallery section. At the moment, it can be somewhat confusing as the main portfolio page has a set of thumbnails, but when you click into the slideshow portion of the gallery , another set of thumbs also appears. This is an unnecessary redundancy that makes the feature come off less smooth than it could.
I am also hoping that we rework our SEO package offerings to include customized geo-specific landing pages. We have added these to a few sites and seem to really get great results.
Future Forward!! >>>>
No comments:
Post a Comment