Our Client Wade’s Equipment Service of Pasco County Florida has had an eye opening experience with WordPress as a Small Business Website CMS (Content Management System).
Wade’s sells automotive lifts like the challenger lift you see in the photo on the right. Wade’s main clients over the years have been auto dealers and auto repair garages. 
Recently however Wade’s has experienced a new trend. Homeowners are requesting information about how they can install these heavy duty automotive lifts in their home garages.
Anne and Bob Graybill, the owners of Wade’s equipment (previous owners name was Wade) wanted to explore the idea of having a website which could help them take advantage of this trend in addition to anchoring their standard business of commercial installations and repair of auto lifts, lathes, parts washers and other garage equipment.
We inspired Anne and Bob to try using WordPress. Not just because it would be easier for them to learn, but also due to the incredible flexibility of the platform when used as a CMS for small business websites. When I told them they could update the site themselves, at first they were a little intimidated. But after I explained that iBusinessLogic would train them in how to use the site and in reality posting new content is almost as easy as sending an email, they were in!
The website url we helped them chose is a good one: http://autoproequipment.com , we selected that url in case they ever wanted to expand the online portion of the business into ecommerce. The new name will be much better for search that wadesequipment.com would have been.
The site has yet to be completed but we have installed and customized the theme, laid out the static page menus and had a training session on how to format a page and a post. We have had the sites up for just a few weeks.
The very first official post is here: Challenger Introduces CLFP9 Low- Profile Automotive Lift
The post describes a low profile auto lift manufactured by Challenger Auto Lift and made in the USA. Anne had just received the information about this new product from her factory rep in an email so we used that information to write up a blog post on the web site. The lift is designed to accommodate the very market Anne & Bob want to explore, residential garage equipment and automotive lifts.
Turns out that the power and speed of Word Press has taken the auto lift community by storm. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but it is not an stretch to say that autoproequipment.com had the information about this new lift online and indexed by Google even before the manufacturer.
With that significant head start, Wade’s equipment has been fielding calls from the far reaches of the country, with questions and requests for quotes on this new product. They may have even sold one this week, directly from the single blog post about the product.
I find this story to be inspiring and gratifying. It is absolutely awesome to have the ability to help small businesses in a way that significantly proves itself worthwhile. It honestly feels great to hear these stories from clients and I enjoy helping them to find their way into the new world of Internet commerce. There are so many small businesses here in Tampa Bay, Florida and across the nation who want, need and deserve better, faster and more productive website development.
Using WordPress as a small business website framework, with the proper design and training has helped this one small company to find a whole new audience for their products and services.
With the speed and power of WordPress, along with the right content, keywords and tags, this website started to pay for itself within a few short weeks. Tell me how many web 1.0 websites have ever done that?
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