I know screenwriters who angst over their screenplay for years. I see productions from screenwriters who say, “we cranked out a screenplay in two weeks.” It’s not that bad work comes from a long lingering limp towards completion. And it’s certainly not that a rush job captures lightning in a bottle. The fast turn around comes from experience: the ability to get through the hard stuff fast, and know in advance where the potholes and dead ends lay. This is why a prolific scriptwriter could stack up their screenplays. It’s why a small web development team can stack up a list of products and services. Products and services that people need to hear about.
In the course of my work, I have been asked to write a lot of code. I’ve gotten good at writing code fast. I can cut through the issues. The result: lots of output. I’ve worked in web design since 1996, tinkered with web design since 1994, and started coding in 1982. We spun up Web321 to scale. We wanted to take our ability to manage websites and experience with what goes wrong and why; and we wanted to scale that service to a market of thousands of businesses and organizations who need what we’re offering. We wanted to carve out a few hundred of those clients for Web321. Our numbers are climbing. Our churn is very low. We’re still well short of our goals and it all comes down to marketing and promotion. It lays bare a problem: marketing to a broad audience.
Using some downtime, we have developed a number of plugins, add-ons, apps and projects. They’re falling flat. It’s embarrassing to admit that we have a marketing company and we can’t market these initiatives. It’s the dismal truth, but it’s the truth.
These are the projects that need something– some oomph– to get them into the spotlight. Maybe they need some more polish. Maybe they need a new application– a new way to use them.
Web321
https://web321.co/our-services/website-maintenance/
Let’s start with the most basic one: Web321. We launched five years ago to help small businesses that need an IT person in their back pocket: people who can keep their website up to date and offer advice when things get rocky. Someone who can take that work off the plate of a business owner or their staff. We’ve had uptake on our services. We’re #1 in Google on the topic of “WordPress Support in Victoria.” Still: we don’t have the volume we need to make this really work well.
There are other players offering WordPress help as their core business. With 43% of the Internet running on WordPress, and plenty of those businesses in the ideal size to use our services, there’s plenty of room in the marketplace for the existing players to all get enough of the pie. Cold calls do very poorly. Our advertising and prospecting has been a swing-and-a-miss.
WP Descriptor
Search engines love meta data: alt text, title tags, captions. WP Descriptor is a WordPress plugin. It’s installed on a WordPress website. When the media uploader is used, it adds in new functionality– it goes to an AI wrapper and generates text that is appropriate to the image in the context of the website that contains that image. For example: a comic book cover on a comic store website would have a different focus that that same cover image on a website celebrating the artist; or a website talking about the pop culture image of that cover.
Business Card to Website
https://businesscard2website.com/
The premise: upload a picture of your business card and the system turns it into a website. It will pull in the colour cues, the fonts and the business card details. It crafts content relevant to the business. At points, the user can edit the content, add additional images and steer the design. When it’s done, the service finds the right domain for you and registers it for you. It posts the website and its assets to website hosting. All done for you.
This service is aimed at people who don’t want to become a web designer and those who don’t want to work with a web designer. This is for people who need one page and no BS. We built it to pack as much SEO oomph as possible to the site the best chance at ranking for its area of interest.
Menu to Website
The best thing about the Internet: easy access to information, even when on the go. The worst thing about the Internet (well, okay– on the list of the worst things about the Internet) are restaurant menus. You see a nice website with lots of colourful photos of food. Intrigued, you visit the “menu” page– most of the time, it’s either a JPEG of their menu; or a PDF of their menu– it’s often not HTML. If it’s not formatted text in the website, it’s not part of the website then it gets indexed differently. While search engines can read text on image and decipher PDFs, their go-to ingestion is HTML. More than that: people hate pinching and zooming menu images on their phones. And for WCAG accessibility: images and PDFs are a dud– a dud that could be very expensive for the business owner who is out of compliance with the AADA.
Menu-to-website takes those images and PDFs that websites use. It uses AI to parse the menus, then it turns that content into HTML. It tries to match the PDF / image design using the same font faces, colour and layout. Our user is given options for how to practically embed the menu on their website in place of PDF or images they’re using. The menu remains in our system, allowing them to edit the menu to update prices and products.
This project is closing in on launch. I think it could help a lot of restaurants that need something to work in their favour. We’ve run the numbers and come up with membership tiers that are affordable.
PropDB
https://web321.co/our-plugins/prop-db/
We were approached by a theatre company to redesign their website. They, like all theatrical companies, had a huge inventory. They needed a good management system to track the items with photos and attachments for each inventory item. It allows multiple users to add records to the database. It’s based on WordPress and an in-house build plugin that uses DataTables.net to show all of the records and allow mass editing. It has the capacity front end display to show off what props, set pieces and costumes they have in their inventory.
This one is about ready to go. It’s been used in beta for two years. We need to polish up the import and migration part of the system to allow inventories to move around. It has very old competing products. It does need a renaming before it sees the light of day. Any suggestions?
Resource Finder System
https://web321.co/our-plugins/resource-finder-system/
Our custom WordPress plugin, inspired by our design and functionality of the Athlete & Coach Benefits system we developed for PISE/ Canadian Sports Institute. We rebuilt this new tool for WordPress (see it in action). It’s specifically crafted to meet the unique needs of non-profit sport organizations.
We have deployed this on a couple websites. We have reached out to other organizations who could use this. The problem: they’re not biting.
Bulk Taxonomy
https://web321.co/our-plugins/bulk_taxonomy/
Are you a website administrator juggling numerous categories, tags, or custom taxonomies on your WordPress site? Manually adding terms one by one can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Bulk Term Importer from Web321 is here to revolutionize the way you manage your site’s taxonomy, making it faster, easier, and more efficient.
The Bulk Term Importer from Web321 enhances your WordPress admin UI by adding a simple form to your taxonomy management pages. When I’ve demonstrated to other WordPress users, they’re in awe of how simple it is. I don’t know why other taxonomy import tools are so complicated. This one just lets the admin dump in a list of terms and the plugin adds them to the taxonomy. No fuss. No muss. This should be added to any site that needs to import a lot of taxonomy.
No News Is Good News
https://web321.co/app/no-news-is-good-news/
If you can’t stand some news topics, use this browser add-on to blur out the news. Use this browser extension to blur our posts that have topics you won’t want to see. Mousing over the story for three seconds will de-blur the story.
I needed a simple way to mute a topic: a celebrity, a politician, a social problem– just tune it out. Social media wants us to see your story to get your attention– it’s called rage baiting and it works. My premise: if no one can see a troubling post, they won’t engage with it.
The add-on is available for Firefox, Chrome; soon Edge and Safari.
These are the products and services we have on offer. People who have tried them, like them. Our Web321 service has very low churn. Our problem: exposure and visibility. We have built up a healthy search engine position. We have plenty of backlinks. We’ve advertised. We’ve done outreach to garner attention. Clearly: there’s a problem.
On a Facebook group, I put a proposition forward: partner with us. Unleash your promotion skills on one or more of these offerings. In return, we’ll share the proceeds. We’ll do the customer support. We’ll keep improving the products and services. We’ll find new utility and applications.
Who is up for a team up? Is it you? If so, let’s talk.
