Over the years as Dallas Maids grew from a startup until today, we’ve had quite a few iterations of our home online (e,g. www.dallasmaids.com). Now, as a humble startup with a tight budget, we had to do a lot of bootstrapping – and our website was not spared.
One of the first things I did in 2004, our founding year, was to design the website myself. I already had some rudimentary experience creating websites. For example, here is the webpage I created while President of Baylor University’s chapter of the Golden Key International Honour Society. This was when it was called Golden Key National Honor Society before it went international and decided to use the British spelling of honour.
Our First Step: The Early 2000’s
Back in 1996, there wasn’t any fancy user-friendly software to throw a website together. Had to do this one through HTML coding only.
Fast forward a few years to the birth of Dallas Maids. The internet had recently become established therefore our online presence had to be known.
The great thing about getting this website up before I was prepared to start business was within a week or two I started to get calls! That was magnificent motivation to move my butt and get going, hiring my first cleaners. Anyway, this was the website we had for 8 years.
The 2010s: Growing with Time
Made a slight improvement in 2011 when I added some shadowing and centered the content.
Our first major redesign occurred in 2012. The competition was getting sophisticated and their websites started looking professional. Hired a few web developers from Pakistan who created this little gem.
The Last Step of Our History (So Far)
This would be Dallas Maids’ online home for 5 years until we switched our scheduling system with online booking (nifty!). Launch27, our new scheduling company, offered WordPress themes which we could slap on and use on our new, shiny WordPress website. And we’ve been quite happy with Dallas Maids’ website since then. And if you are a house cleaning company, I’d definitely recommend Launch27.
So there you have it, a history of our home online. Thank you for giving me this chance to reminisce on our online presence over the years. And a special thanks to our amazing, long-time customers that looked at that first website and still decided to call Dallas Maids regardless of aesthetics.