Extra Bacon

My family and I went to a new fast food place last night. The burger combos tasted fine, but we noticed the menu was lacking. Underneath a set list of condiments, it was all the same. The burgers weren’t much different than we had elsewhere, and neither were the fries. All that was really different was the brand on the bag.

It filled our stomachs, but didn’t do much to inspire us to return. Fast food is like that. We may have favorite items at different places, but at some point we want something more. We’ve outgrown their offerings.

Most of the time, I prefer a sit-down restaurant. Bigger menu, personal service, and the ability to face the people I’m talking to. And I like being at a table instead of having a bag full of greasy boxes on my lap. Overall, the whole thing is a better experience to me.

Dine In or Fast Food

In the world of websites, you can have fast food or dine-in.

There are plenty of tools out there that make it easy to build a website—WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, and plenty more. DIY-minded owners use them every day, as do countless marketing agencies. They are quick to assemble and get out the door. Like bacon, cheese, and special sauce, you can usually choose from a set of add-ons, though of course, the good stuff isn’t free. The main goal of these types of sites is to simply to sell products and services. For many businesses, that’s all they need. Like burgers, they fill the stomach, but at a cost.

“Can I get extra bacon”? You ask the cashier.

“Yes, but it’s extra”, comes the response. “Not worth it”, you decide.

Not worth it.

At some point, fast food isn’t good enough for you anymore. It doesn’t “cut the mustard”. Explaining to the cashier exactly how you want your meal is exhausting, and often doesn’t turn out well. And we’ve all experienced the difficulty of getting the cashier’s attention to tell them the fries were cold. Squirting packets onto your own food to get what you want is messy. The seats are hard, and designed to discourage lingering. The service is very basic, and special requests are not encouraged. 20 million served.

At some point, your business outgrows the armload of plugins. When you try to update your site yourself, you must navigate toolbars and menus galore. It gets hard to keep all the pages looking consistent, and updating certain information might take editing multiple pages and you’re not sure you found them all. Maybe it takes too many clicks for your shoppers to complete a purchase, or the contact form needs to do more than just add another entry to MailChimp.

Extra Bacon

Our goal with custom software and websites is more like a “dine-in” experience. A bigger menu. A tailored meal with as many side dishes as you want, a la carte style. If you don’t want onions, we skip those. Extra bacon? No problem. Personal attention from the staff—more questions, more details and options, and ongoing service for the whole visit. We make no assumptions about how you want your meal, yet we bring the expertise that only comes from preparing each item and every meal.

Our custom admin panels are geared to your specific business processes, not just your industry or generic systems you may have seen in the past. They are designed to make it easy to update content instead of just pages, and every business has different content. Our website systems are engineered for faster loading than average platforms. They are sturdier, mobile friendly, and handle much of the complexity of search engine optimization (SEO) automatically. They are not confined to theme choices, and all the features are as robust as you need. Yet at a cost and turnaround that is competitive with US-based agencies.

No more settling for the fast food menu. With staffing challenges, supply chain struggles, and competition everywhere, small business needs every edge to survive and thrive. Easier updates. More robust features, integrations, and automation. Better experiences for you, your staff, your customers, as well as your vendors, potential hires, donors, etc. We are all about providing powerful value. Extra bacon.

A law firm might prefer to work with attorney biographies, make blog posts, and keep staff and resource-related content current—without fussing with pages and plugins.

A clinic may want to manage office listings, mark which services you provide in each office, and list who is where and when–without worrying about page layouts.

An architect or an artist may want to post project samples to your website and organize them in a way that makes sense to you, your field, and customers without struggling with the platform’s assumptions.

If you find yourself conjuring workarounds, cobbling together platforms, or spending a lot of time updating your website, we can help. If you’ve tried three different plugins to find just the right thing and still can’t find it, we can build exactly what you have in mind. If settling for the basics is costing you time and money, we invite you to sit down with us and learn how we can do better.