Crafting Digital Panache: The Art of Bespoke Web Development for Agencies

Discover the wizardry behind bespoke web development as Hank Eder, also known as Hank the PR Guy, engages in a riveting conversation with Mark Beck from Stellar Web Dev.  Venture beyond the commonplace as Mark recounts his evolution from a comprehensive web service provider to a maestro of web functionality, expertly crafting designers’ visions into fully operational websites. Our chat, woven with a shared zest for the culinary arts, uncovers the intricate dance of designers, developers, and marketers in the creation of digital masterpieces. Whether you're a web aficionado or a creative professional looking to deepen your industry knowledge, this dialogue will plate up some rich insights garnished with a personal touch.

Elevate your understanding of the digital landscape as we dissect the superiority of tailored web solutions over the cookie-cutter confines of platforms like Wix or Squarespace. In this episode, we illustrate the pitfalls of WordPress sites bogged down by plugins and champion the use of streamlined starter themes. Mark brings to life the tailored approach with an inspiring case study of a nonprofit whose scholarship application process was transformed through custom plugin and API innovation. Immerse yourself in the stories that showcase the dedication and complexity required to deliver exceptional, client-specific digital experiences. Join us for a session that promises not just to inform but to transform your perception of what web development can achieve for boutique creative agencies.

 https://stellarwebdev.com/
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjbeck1/

This program is brought to you, in part, by:
Oxygen America

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Transcript

Hank: 0:40

Welcome to the Home Business Success Show. Join us as we speak to home business entrepreneurs for tips, tricks, do's and even don'ts for running a successful home business. Welcome everyone, I'm Hank Eater, also known as Hank the PR Guy, host of the Home Business Success Show here on bizradious. All entrepreneurs, all the time. We'll introduce our guest right after my two cents marketing minute. Today's web building industry is crowded with newbies and semi-pros claiming to be web designers and developers. If you're looking for the cheapest on the block, you may as well just use your neighbor's 15-year-old cousin to build a cookie cutter site for you. That misses all the marks. For attracting new business, you need real web developers. They charge more, but it's well worth it in the long run. And yet even they turn to web support providers to build in custom coding and to accomplish unique functionality.

Hank: 1:47

Our guest today, mark Beck, has devoted his entire professional career to the field of computers. He started by majoring in computer science during his college years and then went on to work as a programmer analyst for several industry leaders, including a global construction company, a well-known life insurance firm and a Wall Street investment firm. In 2000, mark and his wife established their first full-service web company, the Boulevard Group, which they ran as entrepreneurs. In 2017, mark changed the company's business model, discontinuing web design and SEO services and successfully rebranding it as Stellar Web Dev. As in web development, stellar Web Dev. Today, stellar Web Dev specializes in providing vital web development support to web designers, marketing agencies and branding firms. Mark's clients primarily consist of those seeking reliable outsourcing partners for web development and post-launch support. This has further established his reputation as a trusted resource in the ever-evolving landscape of digital services. When Mark is not working, his favorite hobbies are golf and being a slightly better-than-average home cook. I share that second one with you, too.

Hank: 3:19

I actually do all the cooking in my house.

Mark : 3:22

I do all the shopping and all the cooking.

Hank: 3:24

That me too all the shopping and all the cooking, but I usually don't do laundry.

Mark : 3:28

No, no, I don't do that.

Hank: 3:30

It sounds like we have a lot in common.

Mark : 3:32

We do, Hank.

Hank: 3:33

Awesome. So if you would please describe what it is that you do, Certainly, hank.

Mark : 3:39

Great to speak with you again and thank you for inviting me on your show today.

Mark : 3:43

Oh, you're welcome. Stellar Web Dev. Stellar Web Dev, we are a website development company, which development basically means programming. For those who may not be that familiar with how websites get started, developed, launched, I'm going to speak very generically. There's really three phases to a website project. There's the website design, and that's usually done by a designer. They work with the client. They do the color scheme, the layout, what's going to be in the footer and how to get the visitor from one page to another.

Mark : 4:17

Once the design has been approved, it goes to website development. That's what we do. We are programmers. It's our job to take the design files that we get from the designer, the content that we get from the client, put it all together and create a functioning website. So when you click on a link, you go to the correct page. When you submit a form, it goes to the correct person. If you're buying a product, the whole checkout process goes smoothly. That's what we do. And the last curtain, that is web marketing. Once the site has been launched, then it's the job of the web marketer to drive traffic to the site, whether it's search engine optimization, social media, email marketing, paper click ads, whatever. We just specialized in that middle part website development.

Hank: 5:07

What's different, then, is that you're not dealing with any of the design aspects of the website. You're getting all that from the designer and all the copy from either the customer or from whoever their copywriter might be Exactly. Exactly yes. And then you make the magic work and give them a site that takes all of the valuable information that you're provided and all of the design and makes the magic happen.

Mark : 5:35

Exactly, yeah, typically, once we get the go ahead, we'll build out a staging site that's hidden from search engines in the public. The designers will get first look at it. We do our own alpha and beta testing, then it goes to the designers. Because designers have very keen eyes. They know exactly where each pixel should go and once they approve it, then it goes to the end client for their review and approval.

Hank: 6:00

Right, and then, at that point, you make it available to the web searchers, to the crawlers, exactly.

Mark : 6:07

Yes, it gets launched, and then the public search engines.

Hank: 6:12

Then they take over what types of businesses require your web development services.

Mark : 6:19

Well, that's a very good question. Let me backtrack a little bit. When I first started my company back in 2000, we were full service web design, web development and search engine optimization. Kind of fast forward to 2017, I realized our core competencies were the website development. What happened then is I decided I'm not going to do the design because I'm not a designer. I'm not going to do the SEO, the search engine stuff. We're going to focus on just working with the website programming company.

Mark : 6:53

It just so happened that we were also working with a business coach and she asked us before we made this transition. She asked me well, what's your focus? And I said well, you know, I don't really have a focus. I work with businesses and develop websites and in reality, if you're really not market, if you don't have a focus, you're really not marketing to anybody. So she gave me a little bit of homework. She asked me to go back in time and list out my favorite projects that I worked on, the ones that were most fun, that were the most profitable and the ones I would redo in a heartbeat.

Mark : 7:29

And it turned out that it was those projects where I worked with agencies create. I call them creative agencies. They could be a one person web designer, it could be a marketing company, a branding company, a digital agency like an SEO firm, but basically those people that either design websites or support websites, and it was like. It was like my big light bulb moment. That was my market. My market is boutique creative agencies who do the design on their end but they need to outsource the programming. And in 2000, we rebranded and all of a sudden my two things happened. One, my marketing focused on a specific market. And secondly, in the past, if I had developed a website for a business, a small business, I would be lucky if I get to redo that website three, four, five years down the road With an agency and a good agency I might get one, two, three projects a year. So it really helped the pipeline a lot.

Hank: 8:28

I see. Well, you mentioned boutique agencies and, as I mentioned earlier, these days, everybody and their cousins are claiming that they build websites, but your clients, whom you call boutique agencies, create a whole different class of websites. If you would give us some insight on what they do that's different and why they need the services of a web developer.

Mark : 8:51

Sure. For very small businesses who just need a basic website, we call them brochure sites. It's basically who we are, what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, how to contact us, using a service like a Wix or a Squarespace makes all the sense in the world. There's not a whole lot of customization, just really you pick a template, you put your content up and you launch your website, and for those types of businesses, that's fine. Agencies, on the other hand, tend to work with larger companies with larger budgets and they're not looking for cookie cutter solutions. They're looking for custom work. They want a custom design. They may want specific functionality built in that a lot of these other cookie cutter services cannot provide. So we tend to deal with projects that are larger in scope than a small first-time business would need and provide our clients with the customization services that they need for their clients.

Hank: 9:55

I see, yeah, I found for myself over time because I spent a lot of time actually building websites for clients, but I never got into Wix or Squarespace or any of those kind of things, although I do use SquareUp when I'm looking to get payments from people.

Mark : 10:15

So do I. I love Square.

Hank: 10:17

Yeah, it's really good that way. But, that being said, I mean sometimes there were functionalities that people would want and sometimes I could find in a plug-in, because I always built WordPress websites. There's plug-ins for a lot of things, but of course, as you know, our audience may not know, but the more plug-ins that we have, the more ponderous and the larger the website gets and it can slow it down a lot. So you don't really want a ton of plug-ins, and is that one of the areas where perhaps some custom coding comes in to make it better it?

Mark : 10:54

can it can. Typically, what we do on our end is when we're doing a brand new project from scratch we will never use, unless we're asked to by the agency. We don't use a commercial theme. Commercial theme comes with all sorts of bells and whistles that the client may never use and, as you mentioned, the code is bloated, it gets slowed down. There's the opportunity for hackers to break into these. If it's not kept up to date, it's a nightmare.

Mark : 11:26

What we do is we start with what's called a starter theme. It's lean, it's mean and then we build up from there. We will either install necessary plug-ins to get the basic functionality down, but we only code what's needed for the website and plug-ins. That's usually the first place we'll go to look for something, but that doesn't always fit the bill. So on my side I have what are called full-stack programmers. We are truly we're geeks is what we are. We can custom code plug-ins, custom code functionality. As an example, there's a technique called API programming and that's the movement of data. So, as an example, we were hired by an agency who their client was an e-commerce client and they were selling kitchen stuff. Let's just say their inventory was on a third-party website and they wanted that inventory migrated on a real-time basis into their e-commerce store for their catalog, for all their different products. So that's what we did. We did all the custom programming that would pull the data in from that inventory system and that became the catalog that the public could shop from.

Hank: 12:42

Yeah, that was probably a challenge to get that part done. Well, I guess they say it's easy when you know how Exactly. Yeah, you know, I learned over the years to build WordPress sites, but I don't know really any coding. I learned some CSS over the years from doing it, but you know, what I found is that over the last four or five years it's become increasingly more complex. Sometimes, as you say, they're huge and they're bloated, and you get a theme, a commercial theme, and instead of it being something straightforward, where you look at a page and you see this is on that page, so I want to edit this thing, but then you try to edit that page, you know in something like Elementor or WPBakery Lo and behold, it's not really on that page, it's hidden somewhere else in some other type of functionality that.

Mark : 13:34

Yes.

Hank: 13:34

Yeah, exactly, that gets pretty complicated. And that's why now I myself have started using web builders, web designers and that work with my agency, because there's no reason why Hank has to be the one who's doing all that stuff. But that being said, could you please share a notable success story or achievement that your business has experienced?

Mark : 14:00

Absolutely About a year ago. We've launched some very highly customized functionality. One of my best agency clients is in New York City and one of their clients is a New York City-based nonprofit that gives college scholarships to daughters of military officers, so they have a very select market. Now, previous to my agency client, they did the whole website rebranding. They have a person on staff that did the basic WordPress programming but for the scholarship application process we were brought in to do that.

Mark : 14:45

In the past, the application process was 100% manual. Things got. It was US mail, it was the occasional email, it was a phone call and they finally said there's got to be a better way. And I could probably talk for the next 30 minutes on this project, but I'll make it really quick. Basically, we went from 100% manual to 100% automated.

Mark : 15:09

These scholarship candidates would go to the website. They would go through what I call a gateway form to see if they were eligible. Once they were eligible, they had a portal account that listed all the requirements that were needed to submit their application. Then, on the flip side, the nonprofit has a scholarship committee and, with evaluators, they have their own portal so they can oversee what's going on. Once the deadline hits, no more applications are accepted and then the evaluators take over and they sift and sort and they make their decisions.

Mark : 15:49

We launched it for last year and I have to say it went pretty much flawlessly. If for all the work we had to do, I think the only issues we had were some emails weren't received by certain people, and that's not really a website functionality. Email is really an IT functionality and it was an email-based issue, not a web-based issue. But anyway, that was something that we were very proud of, and now we're in the process of beginning the college scholarship process for this year, so we've already gotten somewhere around 60, 70-ish applications or a portal setup where the young women have to jump through all the hoops to get the scholarship.

Hank: 16:37

Right, well, that sounds like quite an undertaking it was huge.

Hank: 16:41

I know who to ask now when someone comes to me that needs various layers of interconnectivity. Yeah, yeah. So now you just basically, in a nutshell, distinguished for me the value of having a web development service like that that can take care of those kind of things. So then a company like myself for, or other boutique agencies, can say you know, we've got most of this website worked out, but hey, we've got this problem that we, we don't know how to solve. Can you, can you fix this for us? So yeah, I think you. I just in my brain. I've just put you on my go to list for things like that.

Mark : 17:26

Thank you, yeah, yeah.

Hank: 17:28

What would you say is the most unique, other than that one may be the most unique product or service you've ever delivered to a client.

Mark : 17:36

That. Well, that certainly takes the cake. That was a multi layered. It was eight months in the in development. The other, the other unique things that we do that maybe the average WordPress programmer doesn't do I've touched on them already. We we custom code themes. We can custom code plugins, we are full stack programmers. We we do the API programming, as I mentioned. You know, not only pulling data in from another website, but we can. We can push data out. As an example, a contact form for business may want that contact information to go to their Salesforce account, their customer relation management account. So form gets submitted. We take that information. Not only do we email it to the appropriate person within the organization, but we put it in their third party CRM system for for their use.

Hank: 18:37

Very good. Well, that's to me. That's a mouthful. There you go, and that will also be a big handful. Is there anything I haven't asked you about your business or about this whole business of web development and web support services that you'd like to bring up?

Mark : 18:57

Yes, Basically, I've talked about our web development services. Typically, what happens in agency comes to me and they've got it mostly figured out. Okay, this is, this is the site map, this is the functionality, this is what we want you to do. Mark, how long is it going to take and how much is it going to cost? And then I provide an estimate. But I have, I think, going on my 24th year of doing websites now and we've done well over 1000 websites. There's a lot of information that I have just through experience. I can also be an advisor to these agencies. If I get involved in the beginning of the process with one of their prospects, then we can start thinking about the website from the very beginning and I might be able to suggest some functionality or can. Maybe, instead of doing this way, we can do it that way and the end client will get a better website. The agency has the ability to upsell, make more money on their end and we have the ability to deliver.

Hank: 20:04

Very good. So it's just better all the way around. And when I think to me, whenever you can go into a project from conception to completion, you just have so much more control over it and the quality comes out so much higher than yeah, and if it's done piecemeal, yeah, All right. Well, if you would, would you please tell our listeners the best way to get in touch with you?

Mark : 20:32

Absolutely. They could visit my website at stellarwebdevcom. They could email me directly. That's markmarkcom. As you mentioned, web dev is short for website development. A lot of E's and B's and D's and B's in there. Lastly, I can be reached on LinkedIn. My profile is markjbeck1. At what? The number one, Mark Jbeck1. Evidently there's another Mark Jbeck out there.

Hank: 21:07

Mark Jbeck at one. There you go.

Mark : 21:09

No, no, no, Mark Jbeck one.

Hank: 21:11

Mark Jbeck one my bad, as the kids would say. Mark Jbeck one All right. Well, thanks for being here with us today, Mark, and to our listeners, thanks. Thanks for being here and tune in every Wednesday at 11 am for the Home Business Success Show here on bizradious. Before I go, I want to say that there are some great resources available for home business owners. You are not alone in the wilderness in your home business. The home business success community has your back. We're an online membership support community of like-minded home business entrepreneurs. Contact me to find out more. Just go to bizradious, click on shows, find my picture with the Home Business Success Show and you'll find all the contact information that you need. Remember, you can achieve success, freedom and independence in your own home business. I've done it, mark has done it, and you can, too. See you again next week. This is Hank Eater, wishing all of you a fabulous day of home business success.