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Challenges of Updating a Legacy System

The original NJ REO site, while still functional, was outdated. Built long before mobile responsiveness became a standard, the site struggled with modern demands. With the rise of smartphones and the shift toward responsive design, the site needed a significant upgrade. The technology supporting the site, including PHP and MySQL, was no longer compatible with today’s servers and security standards. While the site continued to generate leads, it wasn’t delivering the best results due to its dated design.

A Long-Standing Partnership

Montella Landscaping has been a valued client for over 16 years. We’ve managed and supported two different eCommerce platforms for their dumpster rental service, each customized to meet their unique needs. Despite advancements in conventional software, these customizations remain crucial to their operations.

Another project we completed for Montella was the North Jersey Landscaping Services website, launched in 2012. This was one of our earliest WordPress projects, taking advantage of the platform’s extensive plugin ecosystem and easy update process. While the design still functions well today, it’s another site that could benefit from a modern website redesign to improve responsiveness.

The NJ REO Property Services Redesign

Rebuilding the NJ REO Property Services website presented some unique challenges, particularly with the images. The original site was designed for 4:3 screens, a standard that’s now obsolete. As widescreen resolutions like 1920×1080 became the norm, it was clear that all the old design images had to be replaced with a modern website redesign. While the “Before and After” images were still usable, they lacked the detail and resolution expected in today’s high-definition, 4K world.

We addressed this by incorporating new, high-resolution images shot within the last few years, showcasing the same properties but with far more clarity. The new site is not only visually appealing but also fully responsive, ensuring it looks great on any device, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or desktop.

Leveraging Modern Analytics

One of the significant upgrades in the new NJ REO website is the integration of Google Analytics 4 (G4). The old site provided limited behavioral data, but with G4, we can now offer Montella NJ REO Property Services comprehensive insights into their site’s performance. Custom reports track traffic across their three main web properties, enabling more informed decisions and targeted marketing strategies.

WordPress CMS Empowers the Business

Utilizing WordPress’ Content Management System not only helps the design of the site and populating of text/content, but gives the business owner the freedom of controlling the website themselves. In the case of NJ REO Property Services, their staff is not pretty well versed in working on WordPress sites, so they can dive right in and update pages as they see fit with new products and services. If there is a change that needs to happen; rather than writing Atwoodz an email with a request, NJ REO Property Services can spend that same time (or less) updating the site on their own. This not only cuts down on time to go live, but it also cuts down on maintenance costs – no matter how small the minor changes cost.

Turn-Key Website Launch Strategy

The new New Jersey REO Property Services website has hit the ground running. Even at a time when REO services are in a lull (the calm before the storm) the site is generating leads for other property services that Montella mentions in the pages of the website. From upkeep of the property and clean outs between tenants, as well as landscaping service requests for vacant properties, the new site is already generating money. This was not by chance either, we had strategized what services we mention and the corresponding text on the pages of the site to promote those services. We had enough historical data to go on and improve on to move forward with the new site. Then the new design now has plenty of call to actions throughout the site to guide the visitor in the modern website navigation behaviors, leading to more leads that can be monetized. Within the first month, the site was a complete return of investment.

Making the Right Choice

Deciding what is the right move at the right time for your business is integral in you and your businesses success. Let Atwoodz, with years of experience with thousands of clients in different industries, help you find the right web, media, and branding solution for your business’ unique needs. A modern website redesign is one of the easiest and cost effective moves you can make with your online presence.

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In the ever-evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for maintaining a search engine indexed and visited site. At Atwoodz, we specialize in custom WordPress website solutions that cater to each client’s unique needs. Recently, we had the pleasure of redesigning a website for our long-time client, All Rite Custom RV Parts, transitioning them from a 12-year-old Magento e-commerce platform to a modern WooCommerce WordPress catalog. This transformation not only addressed their unique challenges but also significantly enhanced their online presence.

All Rite faced a significant issue with their old Magento site: high shipping costs displayed in the shopping cart deterred customers from completing purchases. Our solution was to develop a WooCommerce WordPress catalog that maintained all the essential features of the old site while introducing new functionalities. The key change was removing the online checkout process, allowing customers to place orders via email, forms, or phone calls. This adjustment helped from deterring customers from seeing pricey shipping fees, streamlining their sales process and making it more user-friendly.

The redesign of All Rite’s website also involved implementing the latest SEO techniques to improve their search engine rankings. By optimizing the site for SEO, we ensured that All Rite’s new website ranks higher on search engines like Google and Bing. This strategic enhancement drives more organic traffic to their site, increasing visibility and potential customer engagement. At Atwoodz, we understand the importance of SEO and incorporate it into every website we build to help our clients achieve better search engine rankings.

Mobile responsiveness was another critical aspect of the redesign. With an increasing number of users accessing websites via mobile devices, having a mobile-first design is imperative. We ensured that All Rite’s new website functions seamlessly on all devices, providing an optimal user experience regardless of the screen size. This mobile-first approach not only improves user satisfaction but also boosts search engine rankings, as mobile-friendliness is a key factor in SEO.

Our expertise in custom WordPress website solutions is evident in the successful transformation of All Rite’s online presence. We take pride in solving unique problems for our clients, delivering websites that not only look great but also perform exceptionally well. Whether it’s addressing specific business challenges or enhancing functionality, Atwoodz is committed to providing tailored solutions that meet our clients’ needs.

If you’re looking to redesign your website and incorporate the latest features and SEO techniques, Atwoodz is here to help. Our experienced team specializes in creating custom WordPress websites that elevate your online presence and drive more traffic. Contact us today to learn how we can transform your website and help you achieve your business goals.

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We began by reaching out to the companies the client was interested in getting their products from and although they were responsive, they really didn’t have any documentation, or support for their product feeds. They all continued (even to this day) to push for the vendors that they promote on their websites’ for their hosted solutions. Which is understandable being that we develop software and we are a business – you don’t want to deal with daily questions and issues from every developer a new retailer hires. But as with all Atwoodz solutions, we’d rather you go with something you own and can use as an asset and value to your business, rather than lease something that can, at any point, be shutdown or erased and you have no control over it. So after putting together bits and pieces of their partial documentation, and then with almost 20 years of experience doing this sort of project, we felt that we could confidently, but cautiously get the job done with the platform of WordPress.

The first few weeks definitely made us second guess if you could integrate their products with any ecommerce solution that was out there. Our platform of choice would have been Magento and using APIs to pulling in the products, but there were still holes in their integration documentation that kept leading us in circles back to the same issues of inventory updates and duplicate products with one of the feeds. We were also up against a vendor (RSR Group) that didn’t have API support, or at least won’t allow someone who is a non preferred development company such as us. The attributes in the industry of firearms is also a necessity and the lacking documentation added another layer of difficulty with this. We had multiple CSVs to deal with and the common identifier in the different CSVs were either inconsistent or non-existent. So we had to improvise and use additional information from other CSV sources to achieve our objective, so we would find a manufacturer number in one CSV and then have to tie that to a sku in another and loop the manufacturer number back from the sku in a 3rd CSV – and this is all from the same vendor. 

Obviously this task was not going to be easy, but we have been writing our own ecommerce platforms and customizing others’ for 17 years. As well as we were the first company to offer multi-vendor shipping through our EZosCommerce product well before anyone had ever thought of drop shipping from different sources out of one store, so we knew nothing comes easy. 

After finishing the RSR Group feed, updating product inventories and finally getting the attributes to map without a SKU to identity products, we were able to make the left hand attribute filter work on all the accessories for the site. Then we went after the firearms feed from Lipsey’s – we waited on the important part because the client was still in the process of providing an FFL to the vendor – and that feed gave us duplicate product issues every time it updated the inventory, so we had to find a different method of bringing the firearm products in. 

Lipsey’s did offer an API and we preferred to use it, so we could get live inventory updates, but we found that in combination with Woocommerce, it was producing duplicate products. So with even less documentation, we utilized the FTP route as we were using with RSR Group. We were able to replicate a Plugin that we created for RSR Group and in turn use the duplicate plugin to bring in the Lipsey’s products. After a bit of back and forth, we were able to establish a consistent connection to both feeds from each of the vendors and were successful in making WordPress and Woocommerce both work with 15,000 products in the store. We were so confident throughout the project that we launched the accessory portion of the site and began to take sales – which surprised our client, because they didn’t know that when Atwoodz deploys a store or comprehensive ecommerce solution, you start making money almost right away. 

Elite Firearm Sales is now fully functioning and taking orders. Of course there will be more additions to the site, but we just want to let you know, that you don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars and not own your website and software, in order to sell firearms. You can outright have your own gun store and take it with you wherever you would like to go – and it is an asset and a value to your business. If you’d like to char with us on what type of solution we could come up with for your business, go to our contact page and fill out the form, or just call us with that phone icon in the lower right side of the window.

We’ll follow up this article with a better scope and case studio article that touches on what solutions we used to solve Shipping Issues with the store.

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People will need to be confident in visiting your business. Let them know how often you are cleaning and disinfecting your business and to what degree. Post links to the CDC site and show their guidelines that you are following such as the sentence you are reading. Educating people and letting them know what they are in for will ease any apprehensions that they have and that lack of anxiety will give them one less major thing to worry about when they are going to be spending money at your business. Everyone has a certain level of anxiousness 6 weeks into the pandemic, so keeping that to a minimum will encourage people to travel to your location. If your customers are leaving with products, let them know some ideas with cleaning the products when they enter their home or office. You don’t necessarily need to create a video for this, if you don’t have content for your office or store, but you can link to another video from some other sort of business that has similar product materials, but definitely don’t show a video of a competitor or somewhere else that they can get the products from. 

Depending on how many customers you have, the square footage in your establishment, and the amount of person to person interaction you have going on, you may need to give out masks to customers. If this is the case, then use the disposable surgical masks. They are inexpensive, available for purchase, and will instill confidence in the customers that have arrived at your business. Chances are that news will spread to other people through social media as well being that these new experiences are often shared on facebook or instagram, so also let your customers know that too on these platforms. You can also get your logo embroidered on these masks to further your brand and customer engagement with a safe environment. These are all added costs to doing business, but this is the new reality that we are entering and the new changes that all businesses are going to have to adapt to, so you are definitely not alone. And the more you stay ahead of the curve with these new norms, the better you will fare in business moving forward.

Here is an example of a video that we did for a dental office client of ours that has been using these measures for years with different procedures that were high risk to both the staff and the patient. 

You don’t have to go to this degree with a full on commercial, but you do feel like there is no question that your safety is paramount going into this dental establishment? People will be excited to get back out to the world of stay-at-home orders and they will want to get back to work and spend money, give them an inviting message and you will have customers that will feel nothing less than compelled to do business with you with their safety in mind. You can write blog articles (such as this one) with what steps you are taking and what services you are offering to create that safe environment. Attach some photos to that article and then use those photos in social media posts linking to that article at the very minimum to get the word out that you are open for business and safe!

You can always call or contact us and ask what solutions that we can provide to either capture the video, photos, social media campaign or any article you have on your website that has this information or other information that you want your customers to receive.

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Just like that statement above, we can also extend these types of communications as well as operational practices to you and your business in these trying times.

Here are the tips that are low cost to you that you can implement immediately to either gain business or impede the negative effects on your business of the slowed economy that we are all suffering from.

Communicate with your audience!

Most consumers are questioning everything right now. Even if the world will be here tomorrow, in some cases. So give them some certainty by stating on your website that you are:

1. Open and still in business. If all your services are available, state this all in one simple sentence.
2. If you are open, but offer limited services. State what you still are able to provide for your customers, so they have affirmations of what they can receive from you. You can also list what you do not have as services, if you are inundated with phone call questions and it is slowing down your operations.
3. If your hours are changed and limited, make that highlighted. People have limited time to leave their house, so they will be disappointed if they get to your establishment and they find it closed.
4. If you are closed, state that too. Use social media to keep your customers informed and state that on your website that you will be utilizing your social media feeds with updates.
5. Health – if you are open, let people know what steps you are taking to keep your offices and property safe for customers to visit. If you are shipping products and they will arrive to your customers’ locations, let them know that you are going to sanitize the products and packaging. Also let them know how they can keep safe and healthy by utilizing your services.

Remote Office Solutions

If you have employees and they can work remotely, send them home! If you have not seen Zoom now on the news, we are sure you have seen LogMeIn, Skype (although it is a Microsoft product with their issues), GoToMeeting, etc. You don’t have to run the risk of getting yourself, your family, your employees, your employees’ families, and your customers and their families sick. This will just cause the shutdown to continue longer from a community and national standpoint, but it will also cause you all sorts of grief and problems in the short and long term.

If you need guidance or software to help you obtain a remote workforce, don’t hesitate to contact us. We can help you choose and set you up with the plethora of services out there to obtain the remote workforce. We can also help you maintain policies to make sure things are getting done from home.

Cut Some Costs

Now is also a time to take a look at what services you are not using while you are checking to see if you are using software suite to the fullest once you have read that last paragraph. If you have services and items that you are not using, cut them off and don’t waste the money. All sorts of services are being let go now because of the Coronavirus, so again, with all that time you have, take a look at your books and bank statements. See what is out there that is some fat on your business and cancel it. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. You are not the only one and some services that are out there are the frivolous ones, so just reach out and turn it off. If you are in a contract, reach out and see if you can suspend services until your business is faring better than it is now. Most people will be sensitive to your needs. Other services (the essential ones) will probably tell you that they are in a bind too and need your patronage. Nonetheless, the only way to find out is to reach out. There may be other services that they can offer you to better your business that they have come across in the changed time.

Automate Manual Processes

Automation is something that Atwoodz LLC has been doing for years. Whether it is something as simple as getting online sales and monetizing your website into a online shopping cart with either your products or services or both, or leveraging the data you already have to program software to accomplish tasks that you currently have a manual process for. These can be times of an upgrade to your business and operations by making an opportunity of it with employees laid off or let go. The economy will bounce back and you can be well positioned for the deluge of business that will be coming your way as soon as COVID-19 is no longer forcing America to be shut down. 

You might already have some software in place that you have underutilized and now is the time to pay some mind to it and implement in your operation. So rather spend money on something that you don’t need to, take it for a spin with the additional quarantine time that you have.

We’ll be posting more articles in the coming weeks to help you navigate these different times and better your business or winterize it for those of you that cannot be open – unfortunately like so many of our clients and businesses here in Las Vegas. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us anytime to get some answers or advice or services. We are here and open for you!

The post Essential and Non-Essential Business Coronavirus Web and Digital Tips appeared first on Atwoodz | Development of Web, eCommerce, & Mobile Applications.

GoDaddy is a great domain registration company and that’s it. They have a great brand because of some risky (socially risky), but ingenious ads that garnered them national attention through Super Bowls, NASCAR and other TV opportunities. They have a great customer service response and their phone support is awesome as well. So why are their hosting problems? 

Simple. Just as they have those catchy ads, they have a catchy sales pitch. Use our Hosting and you’re set. But most of the people who register their domain names for the first time, don’t know anything about what a web host is, or if they do, it has nothing to do with server load, site load speed time, shared resources and server access. They quantify it with a cost and no knowledge. If you do get a call from GoDaddy staff and you confront them about any of these issues, they dismiss them as frivolous concerns that you don’t need to worry yourself with. And that’s fine, if you expect only 2 people to visit your site in an hour. But the minute there are a few people on your site and you are making changes to something as simple as your WordPress blog, you then see your site time out and a 500 error or something else preventing your pages and content from displaying. That makes it look like you are pretty much out of business or have no idea what you are doing in business.

When you have that initial phone call or sign up for hosting during the lengthy domain registration process that offers you all these additional services you don’t need, there was nothing mentioned to you that your site was on a server with a few hundred other sites and that you are all sharing the same resources. And why mention it? Most people will set up a business and website and they will fail within the first year if not the first few months. But the few who do make it through and start to get their business rolling, still don’t pay attention to the hosting package they have prepaid for over the next 2 years at a heavily discounted rate. So as that business grows and gets visitors to the site, the online experience begins to slow down and then the company needs to add some features to the website to speed things along. If you have access beyond a GoDaddy WordPress hosting package, you can do a little something about it. Otherwise you can add a plugin or two to your site to compress some files, but you are still left with the same crappy server trying to process those commands and the rest of the shared server pack’s websites doing the same. Which is pretty much a bandaid and your site is still slow rolling. 

Now you want to do some additional changes to your website to make your company stand out from the rest of the run of the mill pack and you try to get access to the programming side of the site and you don’t have that. That’s where us and most development companies shy away from any businesses hosting with GoDaddy. We would charge double the price to work on GoDaddy hosted servers because of their cumbersome system to access the site and change the files. And their system wasn’t designed out of security concerns, it was built with the sale and the control of the sale first, then their integration into their other services they have no business offering (marketing, web design, consulting – we’ll go over these in another article or two). So you or your developer are now trying to get the account upgraded to an account you can access, but that takes a day to do and a day’s loss of profit and a week of aggravation that you can’t quantify to a dollar amount. Their polite phone reps don’t understand any of this because they have never run or owned a business, so they keep with the script and assure you the top tier hosting package is what you need. But as you find out, you are still on a shared hosting system with a few less websites on that server a little bit more resources. But you are still confined to that limitation to PHP versions, shared space, and limited knowledge base to get the issues remedied with any custom code added to your site. 

And so the issues go round and round with your hosting package. At this point the IT blame game goes on between GoDaddy (who are coached to deny everything), your web developer and your marketing company that has been complaining about page speed and hosting since day 1. So rather than have this guaranteed script go on and on… Don’t host with GoDaddy! There are plenty of hosted solutions out there for you. We offer custom hosting (let us know if you need a hosting rescue or website development), Nexcess offers great hosting packages as well as plenty of other companies that specialize in hosting websites and businesses that are designed and supported to be successful. And not the ones they prey on that will fail like most. So you can see where GoDaddy will make their money. Charging up front for extremely subpar hosting packages for businesses that are just going to fail anyway. It is a great business model for them, but for those of us who want to succeed, you need to look elsewhere and not fall prey to the failing demographic that is GoDaddy’s target market.

We’ll give you more insights in the coming months on the perils of hosting with GoDaddy and other issues that developing businesses run into on a daily basis that continuously lose them revenue.

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The SEO company had some good general ideas out of the gate, but lacked the business experience and understanding of a desert tint company to make a sustained mark in the Google rankings. As the SEO company’s general solutions took hold, they increased the new domain and site traffic to a certain point when the NVTint.com site was being ranked on the first two pages of Google, but for low hanging keywords that never generated any calls or contact form submissions. So the SEO company did what any company would do when their methodology doesn’t work – something that they are not well versed in…. They redesigned the site with the look and feel of Wikipedia – just very general and unattractive. So the site started to tank in the way of traffic and phone and form conversions.

A quick look into Google Search Console and the posting of the site’s article dates gave all the insight that Atwoodz and the client needed to reel the SEO company in and then hold them accountable for their shortcomings. They applied all the monthly fees to the site redesign and stopped creating the generic articles, which were actually bringing some general traffic to the site, but a far cry from the rich traffic that the client’s self-managed Pay-Per-Click campaign was bringing the client.

So with the issues being identified, Atwoodz then started a strategy campaign based on what will yield the best results, the soonest. We automatically changed the site’s colors to the company’s colors, added call to actions everywhere, photos that actually pertained to the content on the page, listed reputable clients and their logos, as well as a list of other aesthetic features to give the users that just visited the site some confidence in the company, that the generic design and bland user experience made the client’s site look just like some referral site. From there, we added call to actions everywhere the future customer would be looking at the site, plenty of content that was much more precise in what the client does and locally targeted content as well that pertained to the desert and the unique values that the customer was looking for, rather than the generic content the SEO company has used that really didn’t pertain to the Las Vegas market. These are also tell tale signs that the actual article writers were most likely overseas – that and the fact that it took them so long to come up with answers when we did reach out to their local representative. When content is created overseas, you also run into the issue that the content really doesn’t trigger any relatable information from Americans. We are very unique in the way we think and shop, so if it is not carefully crafted overseas and then checked, it could be totally content that has zero pertinence to the site’s potential target audience – which was pretty close to the case here.

With this being identified, Atwoodz also gave the client a list of SEO companies that were local to the client’s market that could create content that was exactly what the client needed from their own target market. New content was created for the site to replace the generic unconverting content, as well as the future articles for the blog to keep active content flowing to the site were then strategized for certain times of year and then the different types of applications that were unique to the desert metro area that NVTint.com services.

In order to keep that content flowing no matter what any third party marketing company produced and/or didn’t produce, Atwoodz also created an internal mission and structure for Total Eclipse that keep their social and on site content fresh with all the current and completed jobs that the company had in their resume. With a simple breakdown and even simpler instructions, Atwoodz was able to provide a fail safe for the client to keep traffic and engagement at its peak, no matter what happens with any third party marketing company for a brief period.

After applying these strategic triage measures and future strategic marketing policies, Atwoodz and Total Eclipse were able to stop the downward direction of visits, with now an uptick in visits in the client’s slow season, and most importantly get an immediate uptick in conversions when users/potential customers visited the site. A simple outside of the box view – and a priceless amount of web business experience was all that was needed in order to stop a potential crash in total web revenue for Total Eclipse.

Call us now 702.453.3332 , if you feel that your site is lacking in its potential and Atwoodz will give you a free site analysis with areas of improvement that can be made.

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The new system features the standard responsive multi device layout to insure that all your visitors get to see the site in the best way on their phone, tabet, or desktop. The one-page-checkout speeds up the most important process – the checkout and the capture of customer funds in a safe and secure environment that is native to the Magento shopping cart platform. The old Busso Music site didn’t have much competition on the web, so the lack of SEO friendly URLs didn’t hurt the site 15 years ago when it was first launched, but with all the content and sites out there now, the new site with the new system needed the product orientated URLs. The Magento system and the deployment of the URLs by Atwoodz allowed for the site to be indexed immediately with some Google Search Console submissions and the sales started rolling in immediately – even with a new brand and URL structure.

The new brand definitely posed some problems for us, but with the proper 301 redirects and planning around the site launch with timely Google index submissions, Atwoodz was able to successfully pull off the domain change transition as smooth as possible. By monitoring the Google Analytics of the site, we have watched a steady climb in site traffic in the past 3 months since the site was launched.

The overall shopping experience has been simplified with the Atwoodz shopping experience mantra – “Less clicks to make a payment is best.” So with the one-page-checkout and easy to add to cart buttons, making a purchase on ErnestDeffner.com is even easier than before. We have noticed an uptick in single product purchases from the old site user experience with this new feature. This navigated the online customer to the checkout page that is extremely streamlined in comparison to the old system with what seemed a never ending checkout process.

Call Atwoodz now to get your custom Magento online shopping cart developed for you 702.453.3332. Or fill out the contact form here to get more info on what we can do for you.

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