My name is Eric Jochim and I’m the Director of Marketing for Dedola Global Logistics.

I first dabbled in WordPress back in 2010 when my purple-haired mother-in-law needed a website for her beauty school. Having no experience in web development but fancying myself a bit of a DIYer, I thought – sure, I can do that.

Over the course of a couple spare weekends, I pieced together a basic website. After seeing the ease-of-use, flexibility and user community of WordPress first hand, I realized this was something I wanted to implement at Dedola Global Logistics.

We found a great local WordPress developer and launched a new site back in 2011 based on the Genesis Framework. This was a game changer. Rather than hiring a Cold Fusion programmer every time we needed a minor update, we could suddenly make major changes to our site internally. The DIYer in me rejoiced.

This led to a lot of experimentation and growth in our internet marketing. We saw our pay per click (PPC) conversion rates triple soon after our new landing pages went live. Also, we began focusing on SEO and turned our nearly nonexistent organic visitors into a steady stream of new traffic.

About a year after launching the new site, my wife and I had our first child. As our daughter grew up, I was glued to my camera documenting every moment of her life. Although I’ve long had an interest in photography, she reawakened my passion. When sharing family pictures, I started getting regular requests for photo shoots. So, shortly before the birth of our second child and soon after discovering Divi, I started Jochim Foto as a creative outlet for my photography and a means of supporting my growing habit.

Building that site with Divi reminded me of my first experience with WordPress four years ago. It was intuitive, flexible and opened up a world of new possibilities.

Back at Dedola, we had been toying with the idea of a website refresh. Considering the success of our original migration to WordPress, we wanted the site to continue to evolve from a design and functionality standpoint. In particular, I knew that incorporating responsive design was a necessary part of improving our mobile visitor’s experience. Despite the control that we gained with the project, our custom Genesis theme began to feel limiting.

Embolden by my latest personal WordPress project, I began thinking of the possibilities for Divi at work. Prior to this, I hadn’t seriously considered the idea of developing a new site in-house. However, after spending an hour creating a concept site of dedola.com, my DIY juices really started to flow. Excited by the progress, I rushed to our COO, Stephen Dedola and showed him the demo. He immediately jumped on board. Our previous conversations about whether we needed a redesign turned into “how quickly can we get this live?”

As I moved into full development of the website, doubt would occasionally creep in as to whether I bit off more than I could chew. Thankfully, advice from our previous site’s developer and the extensive resources of the entire WordPress community kept me on track.

We launched the new Divi-based dedola.com last week and I’m more motivated than ever to continue learning WordPress and evolving the site.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that I have more than my beautiful wife to thank my mother-in-law for. Thanks Maria. Thanks for Sophia and thanks for WordPress (in that order).

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