Category: Consulting

Problem Solving is a Core Competency

On New Year’s Eve (2025), I spent the morning making sure my client’s new massage services website went live.

There were issues with how the former web developer set up a staging site on the same host and domain name service provider where the other domain was registered but the website attached to that domain was hosted elsewhere.

I didn’t have access to the outlier hosting company so had to deep dive and problem solve with GoDaddy support, a notoriously challenging support team given they’re all mostly offshore and have a hard time working with these intricate issues.

It took four hours over two days to work together to resolve how to get the domain name transferred to the new site and lose the old site.

That’s what clients need – problem solvers that know how to get it done.

I’m not a developer.

I’m not dev ops.

I’m not a user experience designer.

I’m not an accessibility expert.

I’m not a customer support technician.

What am I then?

I’m a digital strategist and web experience professional who knows a lot of things and one of those is how to solve problems. If that’s my number one skill, it’s lights years ahead of the next person who doesn’t know how to solve problems and leaves it to you to figure it out.

What makes me a good problem solver?

  • I’m curious to understand the underlying issues.
  • I connect all the dots.

I’m not afraid to manage up and communicate across organizations and teams to stay with an issue as long as it takes to resolve.

I apply four decades of experience solving problems for hundreds of people.

  • Whether that was when I drove for a living and made sure the Aerosmith band member I was responsible for got to shows on time.
  • When I co-created a record label and management company startup and built a global distribution system from the phone book and helped build the career of a superstar DJ by doing the PR, negotiating remixes, and securing bookings.
  • When I launched my first startup, Netmix, and brought the world’s most sought after DJs online before Napster, MySpace, and other early music startups.
  • When I led building The Daily Beat website for MetroTV and helped secure DJ talent to interview for the program. On the fly, I learned how to become a television producer and went on to contribute to award-winning digital programming.
  • When a startup founder asked me to come in and build out the music video division of the startup and secure the rights to music videos.
  • When I took a failed project at a multinational corporation that struggled for 6 years to go live and got it live in a year..
  • When I untangled a mess of a website at the worlds first hip hop museum and gave contributors the tools to thrive.

There are so many examples of how I took lemons and made lemonade. My hustle and tenacity are what make me unique and ultimately valuable.

If you’re a startup or organization challenged with connecting the dots, schedule time with me and we can talk about how to solve your digital problems.

Is the website you were sold by a web developer that good?

Did the web development agency who cold called you really do a great job on the new website you commissioned?

Maybe. Maybe not. Or, maybe somewhere in between. How do you know if you’re not working with an website experience professional?

You don’t know.

A new client just had a website built for them by an agency who exclusively works with contractors. He showed me the website they’d built for him.

He thought it was great. On the surface, it was pretty good. I’d give it a 6 or 7 for design and they were using some professional grade plugins like Elementor, RankMath, and even Gravity Forms, my go to for form building.

But after the initial scan, I tore it apart.

  • No FAQs. Everyone in web development today building websites for contractors should build a FAQ page, as that’s a great way to have your answer to a common question surfaced as an answer in search.

Fix: Add a popular FAQ plugin to manage your FAQs. You can use all on the FAQ page or pull one with a short code or block into a specific page or post.

  • Portfio page video carousel has no text describing each portfolio project and all the insights and strategy going into each project. Your customer comes to the page and sees the project video but no other details to sell them on the project. What, why, when, where, and how. Provide that level of detail and not just for search but to close the sale. Be the expert in the room. And include a testimonial from the customer which can close a sale.

Also on the portfolio page, a carousel of random projects where the images were not titled properly, there are no captions, and like the videos above, no explanation of what you’re seeing. How can you sell people on your expertise and authority in this domain by just showing them one photo and not explaining what it is or why it’s important enough for you to showcase it.

Fix: Add a portfolio plugin to generate a page for each portfolio project. Add the video and the images you have and then build a page with content describing the project, its location (for local SEO), and how you solved the problem. Add a sidebar listing all portfolio page links so the viewer can navigate your portfolio and get a better look at what you have to offer.

  • After a Google Page Soeed review, the desktop score was 97, but the mobile score was 67. We know that Google prioritized mobile search.

Fix: Review all issues uncovered by Google with your image sizes and serve images in next gen formats like webp. There are plugins that help compress images and swap out jpg for webp. Resolve critical CSS and render blocking JavaScript issues to improve load times. Use lazy load for images and video. You have to look under the hood to fix the car.

These are just a few of the issues I uncovered that need to be resolved. If your curious whether your web developer did all they could do on your new WordPress website, I offer an inspection and report for just $299* (per website). Contact me to discuss.