Case Study: Coaching With a Purpose

April 19, 2020      Decisive CMS™, Website Design

A new client came to me over the holidays with a great new business idea and asked for my help in getting them an online presence. "I have no idea where to start" she told me. I immediately perked up and told her that I could guide her step-by-step through the process. She immediately relaxed and we dug in.

Step 1 - Figure Out What To Say

The first step was to start collecting thoughts about what to convey on the website. "What do you want to tell prospective clients?" I asked. This was the hardest question to answer as it required breaking down her business process into small pieces that could be easily talked about in a relatable manner. And I feel that as business owners, this is most often the biggest challenge - taking the "elevator pitch" to the next level and detailing in simple terms what it is we really do!

After some brainstorming she came up with an amazing outline of her business process that we were able to distill into a few steps that any visitor to the website could relate to and imagine taking.

Step 2 - Come Up With A Brand

Next we had to come up with a brand. This first involved naming the business. One would think this would be relatively easy, and it was - until we tried to procure a website domain name! At that point our favorite business names already had websites in use by other businesses - shoot! So through much trial and error we settled on a great name that also had an available website!

With that settled, we next needed to create a logo and other aspects of the brand. While I often use a graphic artist for this, we decided to use online tools - and what an amazing result we attained for a very small fee! I Would highly recommend these tools to anyone...

Step 3 - Put It All Together

Now that we know what to say and the underpinnings of a brand, it was time for me to really get to work and start putting the pieces together into a functional website. Using my programming skills and Decisive CMS website content management system it wasn't long before a great look and feel for this business started to materialize. In a collaborative manner, we worked closely to tweak the layout, select photography, and write custom functionality to the things looking and working exactly as my client wanted.

Some of the custom code for this website involved integrating with other systems that are being used for her business - in this case Zoho. Since she chose to use Zoho for email and contacts and a few other things, it made sense to send contacts from her "Contact Us" (and other online forms) directly into Zoho behind the scenes using their API (application programming interface) so she wouldn't have to type in the information.

The end result can be seen here: coachingwithapurpose.com

Step 4 - Attract Visitors

While great in theory (and movies), "if you build it they will come" does not ring true for websites. In order for the world to know that a new website exists, it needs to show up in search engines like Google. How does that happen? Well, search engines will find the website and put it in their database, but it will start a the bottom. In order to move up in the rankings, fresh content needs to keep appearing on the website (which is why my client has committed to maintaining a blog) and links to the website from other places really helps (which is why her blog posts are blasted to social media outlets to reach all of her followers as well as help search engine rankings). There are of course, paid advertisements and the like which are options we have not yet utilized.

Conclusion

As this blog outlines, rather than just programming we strive to be a trusted business partner that can help guide you through a seemingly difficult process. In this case it was getting started from the ground up. In other cases it might be automating a manual, error-prone and time-consuming area of your business. Or possibly creating a new system to jump-start a core business operation.

Let's sit down a discuss the many way I can help...

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