GoDaddy's Website Design Services provided a complete website with design, copywriting, development, and ongoing troubleshooting — all in under a month. I was responsible for creating the back-end setup using WordPress and WooCommerce and designing the front-end with a small suite of approved plugins. We designed or sourced free assets to build a simple brand guide for clients without.

Confident clients are made with simple handoff

Our team was made up of talented designers who knew their way around HTML/CSS/JS, but our clients did not. Our small business customers felt a personal attachment to their brand, so we were dealing with opinionated but inexperienced web users.

Since sites were out of our hands after the initial build, we needed to tool the site to be feasibly editable by these users. A page builder is the perfect tool — while much more cumbersome for us to use, the WYSIWYG interface and beginner-friendly documentation meant that after handoff, the client could make content changes easily and design changes if they were brave enough to play with drag-and-drop.

Lowering costs by keeping it in-house

To further save money, we wanted to avoid paid storefronts like Shopify that would increase our prices and erode our profits. Conveniently, we had a hosting product^[1] that included an automated WordPress install, which we could extend with the free WooCommerce ecommerce plugin.

We narrowed down the plugins available to customers with our own plugin rather than opening the whole WordPress ecosystem up to them. This allowed a simplified update experience for customers, but more importantly reduced the possible failure points we'd have to troubleshoot for customers after handoff. This reduced our support time since a majority of our fixes were frequently occurring and had an obvious source.

As an added money-saving bonus, our familiarity with these plugins allowed our software engineers to contribute enhancements to many of the plugins that were open-source. Several of these plugins offered us reduced agency pricing for our efforts!

From one-off to subscription

At some point, our executive suite realized the big bucks were in selling subscriptions instead of websites. We pivoted to selling our website builds with the option to extend our support timeframe from a year to... as long as the client paid! Of course, we still took care of customers off of our subscription, but fixes incurred a one-time payment per instance. I helped develop the customer experience for the onboarding tool in my next role at GoDaddy.

Stylish sites for businesses, celebrities, and everybody in between

Here's a few of the client projects I worked on. Sites could range from single-pagers to platform-like functionality. No live links since I can't imagine at this point the sites look anything like they used to.