Turning Side-Hustles into Success: Billie Branding’s Story with Themify

15 Oct 2024

Nick and Sofie, the dynamic duo behind Billie Branding, transformed their shared passion for design into a thriving web design and branding agency. Their journey began as a hobby—Nick tinkering with WordPress while Sofie explored graphic design—but soon evolved into a full-fledged business. Through their partnership and the game-changing tools from Themify, they've been able to offer clients exceptional web solutions. In this customer story, Nick shares how Themify's themes and plugins have empowered them to scale their business, deliver bespoke websites, and streamline their design process.

Introduction

I never thought the partner of my life would also become my business partner—but partly thanks to Themify, my wife and I are now cofounders of our own web design agency!

When my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I met, neither of us was doing anything related to web design or marketing. As a hobby, I started building some websites with WordPress and practicing HTML and CSS. My wife was interested in graphic design, and soon we both had our little side hustles. We worked together, but separately, for a couple of years.

A few years ago, however, we took the leap and founded our agency, Billie Branding. We still focus on web and graphic design, but we offer our clients a full-service package through close partnerships with various freelancers. We're growing every year!

Before Themify

I remember learning the ins and outs of WordPress by watching YouTube videos. For each site I built, I searched for a theme that would fit the client's needs. It was so cumbersome—I can't believe some people still work like this.

Pretty soon after my first WordPress experiences, I discovered Themify. I tried a few competitors' products too, but Themify was my first real and thorough experience with a page builder.

After Themify

A brand-new world opened up for me. I quickly became familiar with the functionality and best practices. I loved the many plugin options, which allowed me to offer clients exactly what they needed.

After building two or three projects with another theme from Themify, I realized that the Ultra theme was the best choice for all the websites we built from then on. It's incredibly versatile and lets you build literally anything you want.

For ecommerce sites, our go-to theme is the Shoppe theme. The built-in functions like shop archive settings, quick view, add-to-cart options, and hover cart are a great addition to WooCommerce's functionality.

User Tips

My absolute favorite Themify plugin, and possibly the reason I discovered Themify in the first place, is the Post Type Builder (PTB). This plugin offers a ton of new options for your website and greatly improves the quality of our end products while reducing the time it takes to build them.

One use case was when we built a site for a local political party in Belgium. The website contained a list of people, all linked to their information, proposals, and press releases. The proposals were grouped by period and sent out as a newsletter.

Another great case for using PTB is when we want to give clients access to their site after we've built it. The PTB Meta Box makes it easy for clients to fill out forms and have their information added directly to the website. We've used this feature for sponsors, staff, services, board members, locations, jobs, products, businesses, events, activities, portfolios—really, anything you can think of.

And to enhance the already amazing functionality of PTB, when we really want to show off, we use PTB in combination with Builder Pro. The ability to display any piece of information from a custom post type anywhere in a template is incredible. We can create anything with it.

Conclusion

After working with Themify for seven years, we have no plans to switch to a different set of tools. The capabilities and functionality of Themify's themes and plugins meet nearly all of our clients' needs. We're also very happy with the frequent updates the team provides and have had exceptional experiences with their knowledgeable support staff.

As we continue to expand our business, we look forward to creating many more professional websites with Themify. Please feel free to check out our agency at https://billiebranding.be!

— Nick and Sofie

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