Building with SheCodes

An empowering journey 👩🏾‍💻

For the last 7 years, I have been running a business that I love through and through. It embodies not only the values I believe in but also ones that I aspire to. 🌱

But running a business for 7 years is tiring. It's long days, often long nights and burnouts are real. I am no less in love with the business than I was 7 years ago but to say that things stagnated would be an accurate statement.

Our biggest issue at the time was that the website was outdated. It was functional for sure, but given the competition, it was slowly killing the business. It lacked the ability to integrate with any social platform and the UI was below average at best. A perfectly good website if this was still in 2001.

So, about 3 years ago, I hired a web developer to build our new website and unsurprisingly it was a mammoth expense. They were the cheapest quote we got and it was still a shocking $12,000. In case you haven't guessed, that's a lot of dollary doos for a small business. But it was an investment, right?!

WRONG!

What we got out of the web developers was a basic layout on Shopify with minor adjustments to the paid theme. It had no product filters, no content in it and no optimisation as far as I could tell.

So, what happened next? Well, nothing. Fast forward 3 years and the website was still sitting there half populated, unorganised and in no state to go live.

I was tired, unmotivated and feeling a bit lost. I need a good challenge to get me going and well, the business seemed like it had none left to give.

So there I am, scrolling through Instagram, looking for something to inspire me, to make me curious again and boom - "What's this? A free webinar with SheCodes! What's SheCodes?" 🤔 I jumped on the webinar. Within seconds of finishing it, I enrolled into the 'Introduction to Coding' course and... the fun begins.

After almost 18 months of what I would consider a professional slum, I am invigorated! In the last 3 three weeks I have

Now, 'Introduction to Coding' may not sound like much but this course not only allowed me to understand code, it gave me the skills to build this baby.

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I had some help for sure, and Shopify as a platform does make it quite easy for one to build their website. But this was no small task. I worked with a basic theme like Debut and I built on it. I added accordions, customised CSS and so much more.

This course has been a turning point for me. While I don't think I will be leaving the business anytime soon, I am working to automate it so that I can continue to pursue coding in a more substantial capacity.

So, if you're considering coding or are sitting on the fence about whether or not it's for you, this is what I have to say:
JUMP IN WITH BOTH FEET!

...and then one day, maybe you can pay yourselves 💵 $12,000 💵 for a website 😉