2024-10-26 | Delivering a Website for a Small Business

Since I don’t have enough going on in life , I have for the past month been working on some side projects for clients.

A few months ago when I had forestry mulching come out to the property, the owners and I got to talking. They had wanted a website but the quotes they were getting were way out of their budget. One had tried using Wix but said it was the most frustrating thing he’d ever done! I said “Welcome to web development” lol. I said if you’re interested I could do this and we could trade work. I need some more forestry mulching done and we could just barter. What we call a “win win” situation. I explained what I’d done in the past and brainstormed some ideas. They seemed interested and we parted ways.

We finally arrange to talk about the site and see what they want. This was nice because I got to use some of my project management skills I’ve been working on. We came up with a project outline, clear deliverables, payment details, and responsibilities. Then I got to work.

I’ve typically used WordPress to do these types of projects. It’s just so flexible. Just to be clear, this was before the Wordpress founder decided to burn things to the ground ! I wanted to try some different things and ended up using the Astra page plugin to build the site out.

I wanted to make the site very visual because in my discussions with the owners it was evident their passion for the forest. Thankfully, the owners had been promoting their company on their Facebook page and Instagram and I was able to repurpose many of their images and videos for the site.

From my previous work with the church, I know how important a good about page can be. People want to know more about the people they are working with. Unfortunately, writing biographies is not my strong suit. I was able to use AI to generate a list of questions to ask and then format the owners answers into decent biographies! Pretty cool I think.

But the special sauce for this site is the online estimator, one of our brainstorming ideas. Prior to the website, people had to call them, describe the situation, and they would come up with a quote. They don’t mind doing this but people are hesitant to call because of various reasons. I was able to use Mapbox, similar to Google Maps, and a library called Leaflet to create a map where people can outline a property they want to work on. I then calculate the area, and using an average cost they use, generate an unofficial estimate for the potential client. Unofficial because there still needs to be a conversation, there could be other factors like terrain, access, obstacles that could impact the price. This is a unique feature in their industry and I hope it really takes off for them!

You can check it out at https://legacyland.works and if you need forestry management services near the Alabama/Mississippi line, I highly recommend them!

Why? Well thankfully I’m at a point in my life where I don’t “need” the extra money. After the passing of my parents, I’ve been thinking of what kind of legacy I’ll be leaving behind. While I doubt I’ll be remembered for making an awesome website , I’m at the point now if I can just inject more good into the world that is good enough for me. And helping a small business, they can be more successful, and they can inject that into their lives, so on and so forth.

So thanks for coming to my TED talk. Next time, a special project using AI for transcribing long audio for faster reading!