Adopting change at Beyond Expectations - The launch of our new website!

One of our key focuses towards the close of 2019 was a plan for a new website launch, moving on from a WordPress platform to a Shopify platform, an initiative which was decided collectively amongst the team.

This decision has meant big change for us as a company, a positive one, but it doesn’t come without concerns and challenges. “Out with the old and in with the new”.

During the implementations we do for clients, we see them working hard to embrace change while keeping up with their day to day activity of running their business. We are now walking the same path. It really is a challenge!.

The website we originally created had been a great stepping stone and gave us the ability to define our business, it also communicated to our prospective clients, existing clients and partners about what we do, but it is certainly time for a change for a number of reasons… 

• Our site had an old look
• It had poor search engine optimisation (SEO) capabilities
• The theme we had was quite limited and the base platform had limited support

We decided it was time to ditch this platform and think of something fresh.

Thankfully, we engaged with a web design expert met through the great work she has done on behalf of our mutual clients, who helped us form a structure around what we wanted to achieve.

Much of the time, as we started to connect the elements of our products and services, we came to realise just how extensive our offering is and it was pleasing to see just how much the business has evolved over the years, thanks to our customers and the changing landscape of the cloud space. 

We are in the cloud software business, so it only made sense to automate what we do, leaving us to take our own advice and do something that will show our clients and partners. We do practice what we preach! 

Like any system setup the productivity of our transition between websites had varying degrees of momentum. Much of time involved in getting a website up and running is related to the generation of content while managing the day to day business requirements.

We’ve got lots of subjects to write about to form content on the site, we just have to find time to collate it. This is the same sort of challenge we see our own customers going through with software implementations – juggling their precious time to get everything done.

From our own learnings, we needed to prioritise and devote time where possible, which meant short bursts of extra hours within the week or weekend, or in the wake of a creative epiphany jotting ideas down and sharing it with the team to help gain clarity and help develop the idea further.

We’ve chosen Shopify as the platform upon which our website is based. It is used by close to 13,000 companies in NZ alone, usually for selling products. We’re taking a different approach by using it as an informational website. The beauty of Shopify is that there are many great themes and support experts available.

3 things we have learnt since moving to Shopify

• Shopify can be used as a Content Management System - we work with clients in the space of Retail, Wholesale Distribution and often transition our clients to Shopify to help then sell their physical goods online, but this concept of simply having a service business on Shopify was equally fascinating to see how easy it was to get the framework in place. 

• The themes on Shopify are relatively flexible and you can add apps like online chat Tidio so you have more customer engagement online.

• Shopify also has a fast loading speed as it is globally hosted, which enables your site to load in seconds compared to other platforms. 

This is just the beginning and we are very excited to be able to share this with you.

Tell us what you think!