Why Olive Street said “Goodbye WordPress, Hello Duda”
The Opportunity
For years, Olive Street Design had helped small businesses in the greater Chicago area get online with beautiful custom websites built on WordPress. However, costs were high and client acquisition was slow due to inefficient web design tools and client management.
“We were bringing on 7 to 8 clients a month, but working with WordPress made it difficult to grow the business,” said Nat Rosasco, Chief Creative Director and Owner of Olive Street. “We had issues with the stability of websites, which we had to constantly maintain and that cost the company quite a bit of money. When we’d get hacked and sites would go down, we’d try to explain to customers it was WordPress and not us, but customers were pretty mad at us.”
After investigating a variety of options for a new, more efficient website builder, Rosasco decided on Duda for his team at Olive Street Design.
Why Duda
“We looked at Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace, but for an agency like ours nothing compared to what the Duda platform offered,” said Rosasco. “We could build a website with Duda in a third of the time it took us with WordPress, and we really liked that all of the features were geared towards a team organization. It really helped us manage our workflow much more efficiently, which meant we could scale up.”
Rosasco found that it took two to three days to onboard his team, as opposed to two or three weeks with WordPress. After this short amount of time, Olive Street Design was able to bring its website build times down from 15 hours for a 15-page website, to only five hours of design and development work.
After building a dozen websites for new clients, Rosasco began to enjoy another amazing benefit of working with Duda — his net costs went down.
“When I switched to Duda my biggest fear was that my monthly would go way up. I thought Duda was going to be a lot more expensive than what I was paying to host my WordPress websites. But I did some math on it; I factored in the maintenance hours, the customer dissatisfaction, etc., and actually realized that Duda was by far the better value,” he said.
“The impact on my agency is a tripling of clients since making the switch to Duda,” said Rosasco. “An agency cannot ignore all of the DIY website builders out there and continue to rely on a CMS like WordPress, but just adopting those platforms doesn’t go far enough,” he said. “Duda gives us the opportunity to compete with them by providing us with the tools we need to effectively create beautiful, unique websites at scale.”
Thanks to the time Olive Street Design saves with special features like Users & Permissions to effectively distribute website maintenance to clients, the Content Library to instantly gather all of a client’s content, and website sections for building beautifully at breakneck speed, Rosasco was also able to an expand his service offering.
Over the past year, Olive Street Design parlayed their team’s increased bandwidth into a more diversified offering, and now upsell a variety of products and services, such as website personalization, HTTPS encryption, eCommerce, and more.
After just a few months, Olive Street Design made Duda its flagship product with all new websites built on the platform and many of their existing clients’ sites transitioned off of WordPress.
“What really stands out with Duda for us is it’s easy for us, it’s easy for our clients, and the absolute number one reason is we can build websites for small- and medium-sized businesses at a quality level they never thought possible.
