Internet Director – Yandas Music & Pro Audio

I started my position as Internet Director at Yandas Music & Pro Audio during the winter of 2011/2012 after a conversation with owner Shawn King, outlining the big needs of Yandas web presence. At the time of our conversation, Yandas Music maintained a basic/static informational website at yandasmpa.com with less than 30 unique visitors a day. The company’s e-commerce consisted only of selling on eBay.com. Shawn and I identified this unique opportunity for growth with the company’s web presence, and he hired me as Internet Director to make it happen.

Over the course of 8 years, my position morphed and changed to meet a number of expected and unexpected demands for the company’s new online presence at yandasmusic.com, and it’s online customers. Coming at the position with no formal web design education, I’ve had to learn to be extremely creative and resourceful in order to accomplish my personal goals for this position. During those 8 years I have become self-proficient in the following disciplines in order to do my job with excellence:

• Learning to code Apple’s “Swift” programming language, and developing the company’s first e-commerce app, available on the App Store.
• HTML including HTML5 disciplines
• CSS including new CSS3 functionality
• Modern responsive web design best practices for the mobile device web design
• Content management systems including: weebly, squarespace, shopify, dotnetnuke, wordpress, volusion, opencart, and many more
• SEO best practices for achieving maximum organic traffic in an e-commerce environment, including analyzing and interpreting google analytics data.
• E-commerce best practices for media, video, and typography to maximize conversion rates of website visitors into online customers
• Maximizing online sales via product database integration on multiple sales channels including: ebay.com, reverb.com, amazon.com, and more
• PPC online advertisement strategies including complex Google Adwords shopping campaigns, YouTube PPV ads, Facebook “like” campaigns, and more
• Managing and utilizing e-mail marketing campaigns for a database of over 10,000 subscribers
• Utilizing the jQuery library to achieve special web effects and functionality
• Utilizing SQL statements to retrieve database data
• PHP basics for functionality in wordpress, opencart, and other php based CMS.
• A complex understanding of Adobe CS6 Creative Suite including, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder for use in generating media for company marketing and advertising campaigns
• Best practices in green screen lighting techniques to produce professional quality web videos and commercials
• Web security and DNS IP routing practices for primary domains, sub-domains, e-mail hosting, SSL, junk e-mail filtering etc…
• A comprehensive understanding of each social media platform our company chose to pursue, and how we can maximize it’s use to reach our customer base online

Here are a few of the most notable accomplishments we’ve had during my 8 years as Internet Director at Yandas Music & Pro Audio

• Released the company’s first app on the Apple App Store.
• Overseen an annual online sales growth of virtually nothing to over 1m a year in gross sales.
• Increased the company’s online product offering from less than 200 to more than 10,000 total listings spanning multiple online sales channels including the company’s website, Amazon, eBay, and more.
• Paid staff team increase from a one man show to five full time paid staff covering different disciplines to maximize growth
• Annual unique online visitor growth of 800% from 2011 to 2019
• Created a brand new company Youtube channel, now reaching total video views of over 1 million.
• Total Facebook “likes” from 200 to 4,000
• Generated an e-mail subscriber list of over 10,000 recipients
• Helped oversee the development of a new company warehouse specifically for handling online sales.