Background
A small business owner approached me to improve their WordPress site. Their business, Infuzed Soda Bar, sells fresh-baked cookies and soda mixes. They were using a page builder plugin that had many options and was overwhelming for them to use. They had a big event coming up and wanted to make sure their buttons were working for the event.
We found several non-functional buttons/links due to a misconfiguration, which was urgent as it affected Infuzed’s customers. A misconfiguration also broke their integration with their food delivery service. Several buttons/links were found to be non-functional due to a misconfiguration, which was urgent as it affected Infuzed’s integration with GrubHub.
Objectives
They wanted me to access their WordPress, configure the broken buttons correctly, and re-link their integrations. While I was at it, they wanted me to update some product photos on the site.
Challenges
The plugin was truly complicated to use. It took me some time to familiarize myself and understand what I was doing to the production website’s UI. That was the biggest challenge—it would seem—for all of us!
Solutions
With some time and Googling, I overcame the clunky plugin and updated their site without any outages or disruption to their active customer base.
Results
The images were updated, buttons/links fixed, and the integrations re-connected. After completing the requirements, I took some time to show them around their WordPress dashboard and transfer the knowledge I had gained so they could manage their site.
Lessons Learned
- I can make incremental changes to a live and production website without affecting customers. For example, I like adding an extra character at the end of a sentence to see what I’m editing.
- It has reinforced my belief that Content Manager education is integral to any project.