Founding an eCommerce Wordpress initiative

Project

The salespeople within the company often needed to create microsites for their clients to sell branded products. The existing inventory management software was so niche that a single developer existed for it. That single developer was expensive, severely backlogged, and created mid-90s-esque websites.

After redesigning the blog for the Blue Soda Promo website and seeing the work by another designer, I believed I had a solution.

• My role: Lead designer, website manager
• Team: Developer

Objective

• Find a way to streamline the creation of eCommerce microsites

Work

I created a quick proposal for my boss: Let me use Wordpress, which we've already used successfully for the blog and our designer was using to make another microsite for a niche product, to create a series of eCommerce sites. I had even found a plugin developer that would be able to integrate with the ancient inventory management software, given the right attributes.

My boss approved the idea and I got to work.

End result

My eCommerce initiative was a wild success. I could knock them out in a week or two, work directly with the salespeople and clients, and my websites saved the company approximately $60,000 per site I created. They were infinitely more valuable because I could then also train the salespeople to update the products as necessary.

Reflection

This was relatively early on in my career, before I completed my Human-Computer Interaction degree. It was wildly out of the scope of the data entry job I'd been hired for, but I saw an opportunity to fix a big issue some of my coworkers had. I think it was here that I started building the confidence I would need in later jobs. Since then, I've grown even more incapable of staying in my own lane.