Each day I’m making progress on the Fortrus Financial company website. I’m not a Joomla expert by any means, but today I got the site to achieve a 90% or an A-rating on PageSpeed and achieved a load time of under two seconds on Pingdom’s website speed test. When I started, it was a C-rated site for speed and code quality, and it would take an average of six to twelve seconds to load completely.

I still want to change the site over to WordPress, the newsletter manager to Mailchimp and make a variety of other changes, but I’ve realized that I need to do things in phases that are more spread out. This will allow the content and management team to adjust so that the learning curve doesn’t break their brain or cause so much inefficiency that they feel like they can’t be successful. It can feel a little frustrating sometimes to know that I have the fuel needed (tons of content) to propel a rocket ship into space, but it is tied to a giant brick without any engines (Joomla).

We are currently around a month behind where I was expecting to be at this point, but I’m still crossing off a number of tasks on the giant to-do list I have. I feel like I have my research completed, and most of the major technical blockers have been taken care of, so now I need to help build content and market the site with the hope of looping back around to the technology changes that I want to make.

Recently, I was struggling a bit with my marketing plans and reached out to a friend of mine, David Krug, for some advice. After talking to him for a bit, I was happy to hear that my plans and ideas are still the best ways forward to build and promote the Fortrus brand. That external reinforcement was exactly what I needed, and I’m happy he was so willing to remind me that I am in the know about marketing a website.

Over the next month or two, I hope to convince the owner of the company to let me make a major platform change, so we can move to WordPress so that I can be more efficient and help build the site bigger, faster, stronger and easier…