MailPoet’s Kim Gjerstad, 360-Degree Marketing and Web Design

Custom Design is Crap.

Peel yourself off the floor. We do custom design here at Answer Guy Central, and no, custom design isn’t crap. But understanding when custom design will help you achieve your business goals and when the time and cash expenditures make sense—versus not—is a business process choke point that you want to get control over.

MailPoet‘s Kim Gjerstad and the team understand this point. They understand it just fine. In yet another example of how honest he’s willing to be about the MailPoet business model, Kim Gjerstad reveals that MailPoet’s website is nothing more than a slightly tweaked version of a theme MailPoet bought from WooThemes:

Truth be told, the strategy is a perfectly good one for many—perhaps most—companies. WooThemes, like Elegant Themes and Headway (the two theme purveyors we recommend here) provides a range of well-executed WordPress template designs that will get you started for thousands of dollars less and much faster than building a website from scratch.

It’s one of those “good enough” scenarios, and although simply slapping your name into or onto someone else’s work will rarely serve you well in business change, business process, or pretty much any other business situation, full-on custom work just isn’t … always … necessary.

This is one of the many wonderful things about content management systems in general and WordPress in particular; there’s a huge body of ready-to-customize work available for free or inexpensively. You don’t need to keep reinventing the wheel each time you want to add something to your website or add content to it. And it dovetails nicely with the MailPoet team’s understanding of the 360-degree nature of both marketing and business process.

Want to talk about how you can start implementing 360-degree business process?