SouthcoastDogTrainingInc.com

Southcoast Dog Training and Care, Inc. ("Southcoast Dog") had hired Bizzistance in February 2018 to retrofit SEO into their existing website and submit their website to Google and Bing for indexing. One recommendation that we had for Southcoast Dog was to "beef up" their content, which Sandy, the owner of Southcoast Dog, recognized she needed to do, but due to lack of time and, I suspect, the lack of user-friendliness of the WordPress platform, she didn't add the content.

Sandy had originally self-designed her Southcoast Dog website with Godaddy's website builder. Sometime in mid-August, she updated the Wordpress plugin in Godaddy. And then her website "went south" (so to speak). The website's layout went haywire and Sandy didn't know where to begin to fix the issue. She called Bizzistance for advice.

I had worked in Wordpress a few years ago for a friend and really didn't like the platform for a variety of reasons. For example, I didn't like the multitude of plugins you need to add nor the crazy number of clicks you need to go through to design a Wordpress website—plus a few other technical reasons, like having no access to a database for the forms that are sent through a Wordpress website. CL Safety's original website was also designed in Wordpress, and when one doesn't keep up with the Wordpress updates and other ancillary plugin updates, things stop working (as CL Safety found out); or the webpages lose their layout and can become a nightmare to fix (as Southcoast Dog discovered). Not to mention the fact that every plugin update potentially breaks something somewhere else. It's the nature of the beast when a website is cobbled together with a bunch of plugins.

So after a consultation with Bizzistance, Sandy decided to bite the bullet and migrate to the web design and hosting platform supported by Bizzistance. I design in the platform for my various clients and can enable each site for clients to self-design and self-manage if they so choose. The Bizzistance platform is much easier to use and much easier to design in, because it is "WYSIWYG" (what you see is what you get), and has a more powerful template management system than Wordpress, Wix, or SquareSpace.

When Sandy called Bizzistance for help, she was also interested in changing her domain name. She had been following the domain "southcoastdogtraining.com" and thought that the domain had become available. But alas it wasn't. Someone was squatting on it. So Bizzistance did a quick search and recommended that she purchase southcoastdogtraininginc.com instead, since that domain was available and Southcoast Dog Training and Care is, in fact, incorporated. She bought the domain. And Bizzistance connected the new domain to her new site. 

First, Bizzistance migrated the Southcoast Dog's webpages over to the Bizzistance-supported platform. Next, Bizzistance re-entered the SEO developed in the original project into the new site. Then Bizzistance showed her how to use the new platform. Sandy took to it right away and started working on adding and modifying content.

Sandy is meticulous and focused on perfecting the page header, footer, and contact form. I reminded Sandy that content was king for websites. Any professional could help her with design, but only she could provide good content. After several conversations, Sandy finally mentioned that she had written a "Puppy Guide" booklet and a pamphlet about her business years ago. However, she never thought to put that information into her original website. After review of the booklet and pamphlet, I suggested that she add the pamphlet and booklet content to the website before she relaunched. She said she would.

I was obsessed with Sandy's site, because I'm a dog-lover, and Sandy is a great person, who volunteers her time to train NEADS dogs as well as for other programs, so I really wanted her site to be the best that it could be professionally for her and be ready to launch before I started my 5-day mini-vacation the next day, with no computer access. It was clear to me that Sandy didn't have the time to add her Puppy Guide content, nor the information from her booklet, into her website.

So Bizzistance worked feverishly into the early morning hours and redesigned the Southcoast Dog website with the Puppy Guide and pamphlet content, updated the navigational structure to reflect the additional content, made some suggestions to edit existing content for clarity, and coined the phrase "Let us help your dog to be the best that she can be" (to allude to Sandy's veteran status). And voilá, a content-rich, marketing-conscious, SEO-friendly website was ready to be launched.

Sandy was happy with the design and published it the next day.

And within the first 24 hours of launch, she got her first lead from her Contact Us page (which she designed herself, btw)!

Southcoast Dog Training & Care, Inc., is a veteran-owned, puppy and dog obedience training company based out of Dartmouth, MA