Work, fun, etc.

I lead a project to re-platform a the Cooking School segment of our business. The previous platform was an expensive, home-grown, unreliable, and devoid of web/event best-practices. There were very few opportunities for customers to trip and fall across this portion of our business.

For a grocery store, a Cooking School is not an obvious portion of our business. It was unrealistic to customers to know to go to a grocery store website to find out about cooking classes. We needed a platform that put our school and classes in front of customers who had not previously considered our service as a thing to do.

We researched three platform options: WordPress + Plugins, Eventbrite, and building another home-grown system. We chose Eventbrite based on costs, potential sales, ease of use, integration options, best-in-class presentation, SEO advantages, and speed to market.

The project began with a single test location and rolled out to all 12 locations. Plans were developed and executed to transition to the new platform.

A major goal was to expand reach. We carefully built user journey's for customers starting the flagship site, on Eventbrite, on Facebook, Google My Business, and organic search, to encourage conversions.

We also partnered with another vendor to build a custom presentation layer to both utilize the user functionality of Eventbrite, but aligning to the companies brand standards.

Overall, we improved: admin usability, sales, user experience, and expanded reach.

Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure of working with the Workspace Collective in Florida. I helped them build out their web presence and evolve the experience as they have added locations and services.

We started with a simple site, a single location, and a Google My Business listings. Now, we have a more complex site with contact forms, live chant, tour booking, multiple locations, numerous staff member access, a blog, internal reservations system integration, and other features.

For hosting, I recommended the Wix platform for the user-friendliness, allowing them to make their own content changes, staff additions, and and updates to the blog. We set up a standard U/X and UI for the web experience, which has allowed us to expand the site along with their growth.

I worked to implement an large scale location strategy for my employer's 4,000 locations.

My previous employer had 1,300+ super markets, hundreds of liquor stores, 1,000+ pharmacies, cooking schools, catering locations, and other types of operations.

In addition we needed to manage these locations on Google, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, and 20+ publishing networks. Each network had their own unique requirements, data formats, and other needs. In total, there were approximately 4k listings to manage across 30 networks.

We implemented a service that allowed us to manage all of our locations at scale. Management included day-to-day updates, emergency changes due to weather (hurricanes and snow storms), review monitoring, and promotional messages.

I had the fantastic opportunity to work on an artist website - Chris McNeil, an up & coming country artist in Ocala, Florida.

Being platform agnostic, I leveraged the user-friendly Wix service to build a site that allowed the artist and management to have a professional site that provided an easy way to make updates.

The site is very image heavy and provided users with the ability to interact with all aspects of Chris's product.