EverPresent

EverPresent is the Boston-area company that digitizes families' photos, film reels, videotapes and audio, and I was their WordPress consultant: first stabilizing a plugin-heavy site so it was safe to change, then replacing their outsourced lead intake with a booking application the company owns end to end.

Key Takeaways

  • Replaced a third-party iframe form, the destination of every conversion path on the site, with a custom Vue booking application served by the company's own WordPress plugin.
  • Answered the customer's location question without asking for it: a 33,000-row ZIP-to-coordinate table and a distance calculation route each lead to home pickup, store drop-off or mail-in from five typed digits, no permission dialogs.
  • Turned an out-of-range customer into a converted one, with the flow offering mail-in with free shipping instead of a dead end.
  • Captured complete attribution on every lead, 15 tracking parameters plus the referrer, persisted across the visit and submitted with the record.
  • Made store locations operations data: a validated CSV upload from the team's own spreadsheet updates every location, with geocoding handled on import.
  • Modernized the platform underneath: PHP and core upgrades, plugin consolidation, object caching, and custom code moved into a versioned plugin.

Organization

EverPresent digitizes family archives, photos, film reels, videotapes and audio, through three fulfillment channels: home pickup within a service radius, a multi-state network of drop-off locations, and nationwide mail-in. Its buyers skew older and mobile, which shaped every interface decision in the build.

Challenge

Every "get started" path on the site funneled into a form hosted by a third party, with no control over the questions, no attribution, no record on EverPresent's own infrastructure, and no way to iterate. The service-area logic that decides which fulfillment channel a customer gets was equally out of the company's hands.

Solution

  • A progressive booking application handling four lead types as branches of one flow, built in Vue and served by a custom plugin with its own API endpoints and database tables.
  • ZIP-based service-area resolution with no external geolocation dependency and no cost per request.
  • Every lead written locally first, then forwarded to the CRM and fulfillment workflow, so the company holds its own record of every submission.
  • A launch design built for safety: a CMS toggle that reverts the site to the previous flow in seconds, and a phased rollout across every call to action.
  • 34 CMS-editable fields covering every piece of text in the flow, so marketing iterates copy without engineering.
  • A platform stabilization pass: PHP 8.3, core and plugin updates, object caching, server cron and bot protection.

Results

  • Lead intake conversion up an estimated 15 to 30%.
  • Full attribution on every lead across 15 tracking parameters.
  • Location management self-served by operations, with 4 to 8 developer hours a month removed.
  • Booking flow page weight down 30 to 50% with the page builder dequeued from the flow.