Welcome to Cakebar Digital! We bring your business ideas to life through bespoke digital solutions. More than just websites or apps, we create growth engines that elevate your business. Join us on your journey to digital success!
Custom Application Home Organizing Business
Cakebar Digital creates a unique, user-friendly web presence tailored to your business goals. Our skilled team doesn't just build websites, they craft digital platforms that exceed expectations and enhance customer engagement.
Cakebar Digital transforms your ideas into dynamic, custom apps. We cater to your needs with mobile, web, or cross-platform solutions, delivering powerful tools to boost your business operations and customer engagement.
Cakebar Digital offers more than custom web and app development. Our suite of services includes tailored e-commerce solutions, SEO strategies, post-launch support, and intuitive UI/UX, all designed to enhance your online presence and drive growth.
Custom Website & Lead Generator Lawn Care Business
NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION, CHICAGO, IL
Confronted with the challenge of an outdated, PDF-based game that was losing engagement, we provided our non-profit client with a cost-effective, user-friendly solution by developing a custom app, which streamlined both the player experience and administrative processes while maintaining affordability and increasing user count by 200%.
Our client, a nationally-recognized non-profit organization based in Chicago, organizes an annual game aimed at engaging young people in local and national elections. Before partnering with us, this game was essentially a paper chase in a digital era, administered via scanned PDF documents. This outdated approach not only created a disconnect with their tech-savvy target demographic, but it also led to cumbersome administrative processes. As a consequence, participant retention became a significant challenge, with players dropping out as a direct result.
Our solution had two core objectives. Firstly, we sought to simplify the game's execution for both players and administrators. It was clear that a custom app would address this challenge effectively. Secondly, being mindful of our client's non-profit status, it was crucial to ensure the costs for creating and maintaining a nationwide application remained manageable. After careful consideration, we concluded that a Progressive Web App complemented by an independent online Admin Dashboard was the most efficient and cost-effective approach!
The journey to creating an app comes with two primary routes. One is to develop a native app - a standalone application downloadable from an app store, tailored to a specific platform like Android or iOS. The other is to construct a Progressive Web App (PWA), which essentially is a website that emulates the look and feel of a native app on any platform or device.
PWAs offer several advantages over native apps: they are generally more cost-effective, easier to maintain, and they seamlessly adapt to any device, making them accessible to a wider audience. Furthermore, they don't require users to install anything, bypassing any potential resistance to downloading a new app. Given these benefits, a PWA seemed like the ideal solution for our client.
While feeling like a native app to the end-user, the cost and maintenance advantages of PWAs make them a particularly attractive option for organizations looking to reach a broad audience while keeping costs in check. Therefore, a PWA was an ideal fit for our client's needs.
INSURANCE COMPANY, WAUWATOSA, WI
We built a brand new, custom site for our client that incorporated their specific usability requests along with a heavy SEO strategy that has brought a year over year 42% increase 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 greatly increase organic traffic to the site and generate significantly more leads and policies for our client.
FLOORING COMPANY, MILWAUKEE, WI
We developed a user-friendly, engaging website and identity for a startup flooring company, integrating their existing Google Sheets bookkeeping with real-time lead capture, alongside employing playful flooring-related puns and an animated logo, all while ensuring robust SEO optimization for greater online visibility.
As a newly-established flooring company aiming to penetrate the competitive home improvement market, our client sought our expertise to construct a user-friendly, captivating website and identity from scratch. They envisioned a platform that not just represented their brand effectively, but was also compelling enough to generate a consistent stream of leads. However, as a startup, they were working within a tight budget, which necessitated the use of freely available online tools for the development of their custom site. Hence, they presented us with the dual challenge of creating an engaging, lead-generating website that also respected their financial constraints.
Recognizing our client's prior use of Google Sheets for their accounting tasks, we decided to integrate this familiar tool with their website for streamlined lead management. All traffic was funneled to a single Quote Request form, designed to capture data from potential leads in real time, as they filled out the form. This allowed the client to gather valuable contact information, even if the user decided against completing the form, thus providing an opportunity to proactively reach out.
To give their branding an edge in the crowded market, we incorporated flooring-related puns throughout their site content and designed an intriguing ambigram logo. This playful element, animated to flip 180 degrees upon being hovered over, brought an element of fun and uniqueness to their site.
In addition to these playful aspects, we remained committed to creating meaningful, informative content. We thoroughly optimized the site for SEO, aiming to enhance their online visibility in the intensely competitive flooring industry.
Go ahead! Spin it!
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN FIRM, MILWAUKEE, WI
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 burden 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.
EVENT PLANNING FIRM, MILWAUKEE, WI
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 folks!
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.
LAWN CARE COMPANY, CEDARBURG, WI
A startup robotic lawn care company approached us to craft an engaging, user-friendly website using free online tools. By leveraging real-time data capture on the Quote Request form, integrating their Google Sheets operations, and creating a playful, animated logo alongside SEO-rich content, we ensured their entry into the home automation market was memorable and effective. This resulted in a 56% increase in year over year leads.
A new entrant in the home automation industry, a robotic lawn care company approached Cakebar Digital to create their online presence from scratch. With the challenge of establishing a foothold in a competitive landscape, their website needed to be intuitive, engaging, and effective in converting visitors to potential leads. As a startup, they also requested the custom site to be built leveraging freely available online tools.
In developing the website, we chose to utilize readily available online tools that, while cost-effective, could still provide a robust and engaging user experience. We decided to create a single contact form for visitors, directing all traffic to this one touch-point. To make the experience interactive, we focused on designing a captivating and animated logo, a cute robotic lawn mower, to reflect the company's brand and ethos.
Understanding the company's existing utilization of Google Sheets for their business operations, we designed the website to funnel leads directly to their preferred platform. Any information input by a visitor in the Quote Request form was captured in real time, ensuring that even incomplete requests provided valuable lead information for follow-up. To make the website memorable, we incorporated amusing lawn care puns and created an interactive logo, designed to animate with a hover. This playful touch, combined with well-crafted, SEO-friendly content, provided a digital platform aimed at carving out a unique identity in a competitive space.
