The Website Shop
Founder: Brandon Butler
Web • Facebook • Twitter
4800 Briarcliff Road, Suite 2031A, Atlanta, GA 30345 (located inside Atlanta’s Northlake Mall) • (404) 981-8659
brandon@thewebsiteshop.net • info@thewebsiteshop.net
The Website Shop is a Web-design firm catering to the needs of individuals and small businesses; among the services it offers are logo design; Twitter and Facebook pages; fliers and business-card printing; and more.
HOW MENTORING WILL HELP: “Knowledge and experience. It has been a difficult road to get people to believe in my vision, let alone support it. This is validation, because I took a huge chance on myself even to get to this moment.”
HOW $10,000 WILL HELP: “My goal is to create my own content management system similar to WordPress or Joomla, and sell it thoughout my system of Website Shop franchises. By creating this CMS in different flavors to target vertical markets — real estate, musicians, e-commerce, car dealerships, etc. — and branding ourselves as the only design store, we’ll be able to carve a specific niche in the market.”
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THESE DAYS, a solid, reliable Web presence is an absolute must for a business of any kind, regardless of how much e-commerce it intends to transact. No one knows that better than Brandon Butler, who has been deeply immersed in Web design and technology since his college days.
As a student at Georgia Southern University (where he majored in information technology), Butler learned design and programming, although “my focus was on the hardware and networking side,” he says. His savvy with all aspects of infotech served him well once he graduated; he began working in IT security and also taught Web-design courses on weekends.
In 2007, he started working for Atlanta’s 790 The Zone, a sports-radio giant, for which he was promoted to interactive director after just a year. He gave the station’s Web site a complete design overhaul and expanded his client roster, redoing the sites for, among others, Star94.com, 2LiveStews.com and KFNS.com. “During this time I learned how to develop and design interactive campaigns in a fast-paced environment, which is the foundation for The Website Shop,” he says.
So in October 2010, Butler (who is now 30) founded his company, which focuses on soup-to-nuts Internet development — site and logo design, social media and much more — for individuals and small businesses. (He currently has a staff of four.) His immediate goal for The Website Shop? Designing a signature content management system (CMS) that will make it ever easier for his clients to manage their digital affairs — with, of course, regular help from Butler, who’s been fluent in all things Internet almost as long as there has been an Internet. •
