The Promise We Kept
We’ve all had these “I want to do this” and “I want to do that” moments. Some are more doable than others, some seem impossible, but we still talk about them. Quite often, these are promises to ourselves and to others that don’t lead to action. Like the items on a list of New Year’s resolutions — “read more,” “eat less,” “call your college roommate,” “tour the globe…”
Well, ours is the case of a promise we kept.
This is not just another success story, not just yet! It’s a sincere tale of how a small team of people found the motivation and inspiration to actually do it. Below, you’ll see information taken straight from our work reports, as well as technical terms, tools we loved, and tools we hated…
The 411Writers Case Study
01. THE_IDEA
Create a website for custom content orders
Started out as a side project for the Content Writing Department of a major SEO company, a team of 4 came up with the idea to create an engaging and easy to use website for SEO content writing services that will increase sales and prove (to both ourselves and the company’s management) that there is a market for this kind of service. A market for creative content writing.
02. THE_APPROACH
Design a modern and easy-to-use order experience
We created an attention-grabbing Home Page combining a geometric and robust typography with a black and green palette. We intentionally used orange highlights and broke every design rule there is, to grab the attention of the audience while still presenting an image of professionalism and responsibility.
Our initial idea for the process of placing an order was to make it an experience of five guided steps, but we soon realized that it would be much better for it to be faster and easier. After some careful tailoring, we transformed the 5-step order process into a single-step one. As part of our future-proof concept, we decided to go wild, and in the end, we had user profiles, a cart checkout, discount coupons, and online payments.
03. THE_TOOLS
Choose a reliable and future-proof toolset
- WordPress
- Google Analytics
- Hotjar
- Disqus
We knew we needed an easy-to-manage and SEO-friendly system, so we went with WordPress as our CMS of choice. Its dominance on the CMS market, good documentation, and a huge number of third-party integrations made the choice easy. To keep a close watch on our website, we use Google Analytics and Hotjar. We installed the Disqus comment system for our blog section, created sign up forms, and made browser push notifications (without being annoying) for the readers who want the fastest and most recent news about us.
04. THE_CONTENT
Show our readers what are they paying for
It’s one thing to write just any content for just any industry and hope for the best, but when you write your own piece of content, things become different. This is our actual resume, and the most important part of our portfolio. We are advertising ourselves as the professionals that can sell anything to anyone just in a few sentences, but can we really do that?
YES! Yes, we can do that, BUT this doesn’t seem realistic or professional. Instead of bragging about how great we are, we’ve decided to highlight our strengths, prove that we can deliver something unique, and point out the importance of such services. All of this is well organized and design-compliant for a better user experience.
05. SOCIAL_MEDIA
Engage our customers on social media and gain extra traffic
There is no better way of keeping our users engaged than creating daily posts on all our social media accounts. This was also our initial strategy to drive some traffic to our website. We started sharing writing-related posts, posted pictures from our team building party, announced 10% discounts for the first subscribers, started retweeting famous tweets, and we even made fun of Trump’s “misspelling accident” to make a point of how important proofreading is. We aimed at being engaging without unnecessary aggressive promotion.
06. LINK_BUILDING
More traffic and more headaches
The moving force behind our campaign works at an SEO company. They gave us access to a list of 500+ directories to submit our link to. We thought that link building would be one of the easiest things to do and left it for the end, but…
Not only did we have a hard time finding quality websites to submit our link to, but the Internal link building between our pages was a lot more complicated than we originally thought. We didn’t give up, and we found at least some directories that approved our link submissions. As for the internal links, we carefully planned the hierarchy of the pages and how they would be connected to generate maximum effect.
07. THE_CHALLENGES
Overcoming challenges like pros
As we needed custom-tailored solutions for our ideas, we faced some interesting challenges while building the website. See the list of some of the most interesting ones:
- Adding all the information from our custom content order form to a WooCommerce cart without page reloading and displaying all the selected information at checkout.
- Importing thousands of ready articles from our internal system to a custom post type that can be added to cart
- Automatic deletion of the Unique-Ready content articles posts when the payment is made
- A samples page with flip cards and popups with the samples
- Increasing delivery time for custom content based on the word count and number of articles ordered.
- A custom blog layout with a custom author picture and automatic read time calculation for every article.
- An Easter Egg — popup poem which gives the user a discount if they rate it positively.
- Hide text for proofreading from cart and checkout, with the option to expand to see the full text for proofreading.
- Get 10/10 email deliverability
- Submit our link to quality directories
- Come up with a hierarchy between pages
- Getting followers on social media
08. The_Grand_Finale?
More like the Grand Opening! We know there is a lot more to be done (which is good, we believe) but at least we’ve managed to build a fully functioning website from scratch. It wasn’t easy, it’s not going to get easier, but we had the idea, we brainstormed, and…
