"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play" – Abraham Maslow
Cakebar is a full-service, custom website and application development company. From idea to completion, we help companies build awesome products for the web. Visit our Products page to see what we can do for you!
"Hey, Laura...where did you put that cake from last night? ...I finished it? Shoot." Erik loves developing code, designing, Product Hunt, his Kindle, finding the perfect GIF, and sprinkles. Erik hates empty cake plates.
"This button doesn't work. Erik, this button needs to work. I don't know what to do with it." Laura loves details. Even more, Laura loves details that work. Even more even more, Laura loves Erik. She also loves cake.
Have an awesome project or idea you'd like to see become a reality? Feel free to tell us about it using any method below!
We focus on crafting beautiful and useful websites that help enhance our clients' online presences. Read one of our case studies below to find out how! ...OR see some of the other amazing sites we have created!
We built a brand new, custom site for our client that incorporates their specific usability requests along with a heavy SEO strategy that brings in new organic traffic. This new site also allowed our client to cancel a costly monthly subscription to their previous cookie-cutter site that was only-partially meeting their needs. Continue reading to find out how we did it!
Our client, a leader in the insurance industry, already had a website. However, it was created with a generic template builder and felt cluttered, unsettled, and just not-good-looking (next image). Additionally, there were many features they wanted in the site, but couldn't have because of the template. They feared many of these factors were, potentially, losing them customers. On top of that, our client was getting billed $300, monthly, for this template service that only partially met its needs. Nope.
Old site. Yuck.
After completing a full audit on our client's previous site, while referencing their Google Analytics and market trends, we realized a core problem was its lack of user-intutivity and friendliness. To remedy this, we created a brand new, custom-coded site to the exact specifications they required and needed. No more "find a template that kind of works." The new site did everything their previous site needed to do, had additional features they wanted but couldn't have with the other site, it did it better than the old site, and it did it for a lot less. We also built a brand new, dynamic quote form for the site that gently guides prospects through their quote choices rather than intimidatingly bombard them with all the options at once. When the site was completed, our client was able to cancel the $300/month site service subscription they had with a site that "kind of" worked and start benefiting from the new site it needed.
New site! Yay!
The service our client was subscribed to bragged about offering multiple plug-and-play website templates businesses could choose from. The problem? Imagine if a store only made 10 types of shirts. How are you going to stand out in that sea of uniformity? Also, just like there are way more than 10 body types, each company cannot expect to fit comfortably (or well) into the mold of a generic website template. Now pay $300/month for that non-unique, kind-of-okay-fitting shirt. Again, nope. We decided a full site rewrite was the best and cheapest option for them...and we directed our focus to solve their biggest problem...a lack of site traffic. Through user interface and user experience tweaks specifically designed around the core of what this company wanted in a website, along with a full, unique mobile site campaign, we were able to increase organic traffic to the site and generate significantly more leads and policies for our client.
Check out some of these awesome sites and identities we have created! The best part? Each site has helped positively transform its client's business and increased their online presence! Click on each title to visit the page.
Flip Flooring specializes in flooring installation for both commercial and residential clients.
Elevated Insurance is an independent insurance agency that provides Home Insurance, Auto Insurance, and Non Profit Insurance for Waukesha and all of Wisconsin.
Lawn Robo is your source for Robot Lawn Mowers and Robot Lawn Mowing Services.
GutterGrizzly is your source for fast and affordable gutter cleaning services.
FidoStop is your source for fast, easy and affordable hidden pet fences anywhere within 2 hours of the Greater-Milwaukee area.
EMBerg Ventures is a family-owned business focused on providing our customers Affordable, Reliable, and Eco-Friendly solutions.
Dm-connection & Events is a full service destination management concierge in Milwaukee, WI providing clients with customized events tailored to every budget level.
Professional home organizing, custom closets, and custom shelf design in the Milwaukee area.
With an emphasis on simplicity, while focusing on your specific needs, we create custom app solutions to help solve pesky problems. Read one of our case studies below to find out how!
We built a custom project/customer management app for our client to help streamline the way they do business, organize their finances, and make tax-time much easier. Continue reading to find out how we did it!
Our client, an organizational design firm, was keeping all customer records and projects in hundreds of separate spreadsheet files. As the business grew, accessing them, effectively, was becoming cumbersome and messy. Tax time was a nightmare.
We created a custom, unified project/customer-relationship manager to our client's specific needs, allowing them to easily access all customer data and purchases, and track the projects in-progress for each. Additionally, we built in other business-related tools like mileage tracking, sales records, and exporting features for tax purposes. The new app needed to be clean, simple to use on desktop and mobile, and effective, consolodating all business data into one convenient location.
Using our client's existing data, we were able to track and display stats for each customer and project, dashboard-style, as a quick visual reference for them. Then, within each project, our client can track tasks, purchase recommendations, sessions, and costs/income. Additionally, we were able to tap into our client's phone location data to auto-track mileage.
Tax time was a stressful burdon on our client's productivity, as they needed to comb hundreds of spreadsheets for data. To alleviate that stress, we built in a feature that takes all purchase and income data collected in the app, along with mileage, and aggregates them into a simple export to give to their CPA.
The tool was designed to be intuitive, with minimal input required to keep detailed numbers, logs, and stats. Most importantly, the tool helped improve the efficiency of our client's business.
Helping your online presence get seen in a sea of search results. Read one of our case studies below to find out how!
Through strategic SEO, we were able to increase our client's search visibility from the third page of results up to the first page within two months! Continue reading to find out how we did it!
Our client, an event planner in the Milwaukee area, discovered they rarely showed up on the first page of search results. ...and since 75% of users rarely scroll past the first page, the likelihood that our client's site would be organically visited, let alone seen, was minimal. This was an issue for a company in an industry where half of their business gets generated through search results.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a technical and creative process that helps a website display higher in search results. Taking multiple factors into account, including keywords, market research, link auditing, and custom website code, we created an SEO campaign that helped search engines better-know what is on our client's site. This both helped to increase the site's credibility, boosting its rank in search results, and gave the end-user a better chance of finding our client's relevent content in a sea of online clutter. When we were finished, our client climbed from the third page of search results to the first page in only a few months. Just for fun, type "destination management milwaukee" into Google and see who comes up as one of the first results! These guys!
Against common perception, SEO is not some quick "one thing" that can be changed to automatically raise a company to the first or second result in search queries. SEO is more of a creative art than a science, and can be a long process. But its theories for success hold true. With some specialized tools and extensive investigative prowess, we were able to figure out market niche areas that were underrepresented in our client's industry, leverage those areas to increase our client's site's reputation on search engines, and thus pave a way for their site to appear higher in search rankings. With their new first-page search rankings, rather than only 25% of search users, our client was now in a position to capture all 100% of them.