I purchased the domain www.milagrocleaning.com for my family’s home cleaning business. My mother has created a really great business starting from one home to now having a list of over 50 homes in the Northern Virginia area through word of mouth. Her clients over the past twenty years have included former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and current CNN corespondent Wolf Blitzer. With a booming housing market, sellers have finally started to see a return on their investment by selling their homes. Unfortunately, this has created a higher than average customer attrition for my family’s business. With references and word of mouth tapping out, we’re turning to the online space to gain customers and fill the gaps in the schedule.
This website should meet two goals; It should create more clients for my family’s business, and it should create an online revenue stream to pay off the cost of building it and having it hosted. The websites audience should be home owners that are looking for professional home cleaning services in the Northern Virginia area. There are specific areas in Northern Virginia that we would like to target over others, like Arlington and Alexandria as opposed to Sterling, Fairfax, and Burke. I look at the project as another one of my personal clients, and a source of revenue by creating a website that has the space to either sell affiliate products through a shop page or selling sponsored blog posts. The website should have a responsive and clean design that showcases great looking houses visually. I hope to use the skills I have learned in this web development course to show off and grow my family’s business.
Description: A website that will provide an alternative to big brand chain home cleaning companies.
Goals:
- Create a website that coverts traffic into leads (Receive calls for home cleaning estimates)
- Design that illustrates clean lines and is responsive to mobile
- Site that incorporates visual assets to create self made reputation
- Encourage content creation and addition by admin users.
Audience: The website should attract web traffic from Northern, Virginia home owners interested in home cleaning service.
Measurement:
- Internal linking structure that guides users to a contact form page.
- A bright website that has clean lines throughout and looks equally as attractive on mobile and tablet as it does on desktop.
- Use social network APIs to integrate visual assets into the website (Flickr/Instagram)
- Create custom boxes/inputs in “Portfolio” post type to facilitate addition of content
Theme: BigBang
Draft List:
- Create a custom input box in the “Portfolio” post type
- Slow down main page rotator to increase the time an image is displayed to a user
- Add sharing functionality to pages to encourage content virility
- Create custom form to grab necessary information
- Effectively use categories and tags to create hierarchal structure
- Change colors throughout as necessary to coincide with already established logo/brand
- Edit as I see fit
You have a very concerete focus here (the “what”), so definitely start thinking about “how” you plan to achieve these goals.
I don’t know if you’re allowed to take pictures of houses for your site, but if so, BCN construction has beautiful houses in Arlington. That could be a good attention grabber for potential Arlington clients. Anyone that lives there would recognize those homes instantly.
It’s intriguing to have such a clear focus for your site, and I can almost envision it already. I think that the fact that your family’s business is already established can help with some of your infrastructure. As in, you can have a section devoted to testimonials (if you could get Wolf and/or Helms to do so would really help sell the service). I would advise you to find a neat out-of-the-box way to do that, rather than a boring, static page. How you do that is up to you!