The challenge

CertaPro Painters® began with the vision of making residential and commercial painting services easier and more convenient for homeowners and business owners. From the beginning, their promise has been that of certainty, aiming to reassure customers of their quality and expertise. While today they are the largest residential painting contractor in North America, their locally owned and operated franchises take pride in bringing personalized service to customers in every region, allowing them to focus on what matters most.

To fulfill their corporate vision, CertaPro needed to evolve their franchise marketing platform based on beautiful new designs they had created with their marketing partner. The timeline was tight, with a deadline during the December holiday season. Their new digital marketing manager had his sights on a WordPress multisite platform implementation, and partnered with Blue Sequoyah Technologies to make it a reality.

As a national organization with close to 400 franchises the business and technical requirements were many and varied. The key was to allow the corporate office to manage and syndicate company-wide content, while allowing marketing partners and franchisees to manage and publish their own, and connect to their IT infrastructure to provide real-time appointment scheduling.

CertaPro Painters

Industry

  • Residential and commercial services

Project timeline

  • 6 months for MVP

Blue Sequoyah Technologies services

  • Technical research, consulting
  • CMS development
  • API integrations
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Github source code repository management

The result

We worked with CertaPro to understand their franchising ecosystem, marketing roles and functions, publishing and syndication needs, and technical requirements. We then set up a slack workspace to have real-time communication with all of the stakeholders throughout the development process.

We identified WPEngine as the host of choice, as well as key WordPress plugins that we would use or fork to achieve features like granular syndication, sharing of content and images, photo galleries, services, promotions, and more. We leveraged React for the zip code locator tool and appointment scheduler, which meant that no page loads were needed when searching for a local CertaPro business or when requesting an appointment.

We also integrated the Postmark transactional email service for communications with customers requesting appointments.

Summary

  • WordPress Multisite on WPEngine
  • Almost 400 franchise sites hosted
  • Responsive HTML5 framework with a great mobile experience
  • Integration with the Postmark transactional email service
  • Publishing workflow supports corporate communications, marketing partners, and franchisees
  • Shared content and images between franchises, and across the company
  • React UI components for interactive zip code locator and appointment scheduling
  • Happy CertaPro customers!