by Joseph Graves | Jan 2, 2014 | 30 Day Blog Challenge, Articles
How can we help you?
There. That’s it. It very simply gets to the heart of the matter. Businesses exist to serve the customer’s needs.
Before you try to meet someone’s needs, it helps to know what those needs are. Many businesses (and salespeople) mistakenly assume to know what the needs of their customers are. Maybe they do, but you know what they say about assuming- something about making an ass out of….well you know the rest, so why take the risk?
The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
–Thomas Berger
Ask and you shall receive! You never know what you might learn from asking questions. At a minimum, you’ll confirm what you thought you knew, but you might just uncover a need you never knew existed.
At Workshed, we like solving problems, and we really like solving problems for our customers.
So how can we help you?
Contact Us
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by Joseph Graves | Dec 13, 2013 | Articles, Marketing, Technology
Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea…
Just because you can do something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. There are many things in life we can make from scratch, but don’t simply because it’s not necessary or practical. For example, if I wanted to bake a loaf of bread, I could plant wheat, harvest it a few months later, thresh it, mill it, and mix it with the other ingredients I had to grow. Or, I could just buy freshly milled flour and other quality ingredients from a reputable company and get 99% of the benefit for a fraction of the cost. The same is true of building websites. Sure, we could code every line of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and php from scratch, but do we really need to? At Workshed, we think not.
It’s been our experience that custom themes for WordPress are expensive…at best. Most of the time they end up being problematic maintenance nightmares, wasting time and money for the duration of their existence. This is not to say that websites should be templates or even that customization isn’t worthwhile, just that it’s what and where you spend your time customizing that matters most.
We prefer to start with a premium framework like Genesis or Thesis and customize from there. Doing this allows us to focus our customization time on things like SEO, content, images and graphics (we are not fans of stock photos), as well as layout and functionality. All of the security, maintenance, and updating is expertly handled by the teams of developers at the theme framework companies; software engineers that focus exclusively on writing excellent code. This delegation of the core functionality means we can focus on the stuff that leads to more sales; things like creating content that makes your phone ring with new orders.
A full custom, built from scratch website is fine too, just know it’ll come with a few idiosyncrasies…kind of like owning a vintage British sportscar.
Contact us if you want to discuss how we use websites, social media, and our business perspective to grow your business.
Contact Us
by Joseph Graves | Oct 29, 2013 | Workshed News
WordPress recently released version 3.7 affectionately dubbed “Basie” in honor of “Count Basie,” and with it come automatic updating! Of course, this might be a nightmare for older sites with “custom” themes, but for most people it’s a helpful way to improve website security. (more…)
by Joseph Graves | Oct 26, 2013 | Articles, Workshed News
[twocol_one]
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]The Vancouver Business Journal published their Business Spotlight about Workshed! Both the author (Jodie Gilmore) and photographer (Buck Heidrick) were enjoyable to work with and did a nice job of conveying what we’re trying to do for our clients.
Read it on the VBJ site here: Workshed Inc: Business Spotlight
Read the pdf version here: Workshed Inc: Business Spotlight – pdf[/twocol_one_last]
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by Joseph Graves | Aug 22, 2013 | Tools, Workshed News
A fresh coat of paint.
Well by now the word is out, Workshed is under new ownership…and look what they did to the logo and website!
Sure, we could’ve left things as they were, worked less hours, ate a few more meals, but then would it really be ours? We love the tradition of Workshed, the way the name evokes (for us at least) feelings of craftsmanship, service, and small town values and it was important to demonstrate our own style and perspective.
Plus the new office is in downtown Washougal (as a Camas grad Joe cannot utter the phrase go Panthers!) so for fun we brought out the orange in the logo and website. It’s very much a work in progress, but go ahead and pull it up on your phone or tablet. It should (assuming everything is functioning properly) automatically resize itself to fit your device. Web nerds call this a responsive design and we think it’s crucial for businesses on the web.
Why you ask?
Just think how often you look something up on your phone. Maybe you like long load times and pinching, zooming, and scrolling all over. The people that track this sort of behavior say most people don’t and that it means lost revenue. How a website looks on a mobile device is one of the questions from our “3 Question Website Review,” if you want a copy just click the button.
3 QUESTION WEBSITE REVIEW
Let us know how your site measures up to the quick review, we’d be happy to help with any changes you need.
