I remember, as a young boy, visiting The Co-op with my dad.
He was a farmer before crime started crushing our country. And so, we’d often make our way to The Co-op to buy goods for the farm, be it feed, diesel or whatever else.
I never realized how big the company was, though.
In fact, one of the things that most intrigued me all those years ago was the name. We only knew it as Die Humansdorpse Koöperasie, but it was located in our town, which in a small boy’s mind is a million miles away.
I could never understand why the name of a company in our town would contain the name of a different town.
Only later did I realize that The Co-op’s name was actually a misnomer, since it operates in many locations across South Africa and has an enormous annual turnover.
When the opportunity arose to assist them in bettering their online presence, it was tinged with a smidgen of nostalgia.
It’s a colossal honor, firstly, to be associated with a company like The Co-op. It’s not every day a small business gets an opportunity to service such a magnificent company.
But it’s more than that. Working with them takes me back to my early childhood and memories of walking into Die Humansdorp Koöp alongside my father.
And that’s special.
But why did they need a new website?
There were several issues with their old site…
It wasn’t mobile-friendly. This had an impact on their mobile search engine rankings, which was evident from their position in Google’s mobile search pages.
One of their affiliate businesses was outranking them for their name. That’s because the affiliate business’ website is mobile-friendly.
Their old site was also difficult to maintain, since it didn’t have an admin panel and lacked a content management system.
With my help, all of these issues are now something of the past.
The whole system is set up to make it easy for them to keep their clients informed with company news as well as product specials.
And they can update most elements of the site all by themselves. I only need to jump in if they require technical assistance.
Regarding their website, we gave them exactly what they wanted. We literally sat with one of the top-level managers and built to their spec.
It wasn’t long before other sites in their stable of businesses moved over to our hosting service.
Today we service not just the main Co-op website, but a stable of sites connected to businesses they own.