RoofersCoffeeShop®: Growth of a Successful Business

The award-winning RoofersCoffeeShop website is an excellent example of how a business can grow with the expert help of their trusted partner, Intrada Technologies.

RoofersCoffeeShop^® began in the late 1980s as a small, classified newspaper called Roofer’s Exchange. It offered traditional classified ads focused on the roofing industry.

In 2002, Roofer’s Exchange founder and owner Vickie Sharples and her marketing-minded friend, Heidi J. Ellsworth, recognized the potential of the internet and its impact on traditional media. With Heidi’s help, Vickie established RoofersCoffeeShop, as a support site for her newspaper.

The focus remained on the newspaper through the mid 2000s, but as customers and clients embraced technology, Vickie decided to go fully digital. In 2015, Vickie invited Heidi to join her as a partner in the business and later as president of the company.

Finding Ways to Prove the Value of Digital Media to Traditional-Media-Loving Customers

Heidi’s extensive background in sales and marketing taught her to recognize precisely what she wanted regarding vendors, websites, and methods of communicating results with RoofersCoffeeShop customers.

When Heidi joined RoofersCoffeeShop, their customers were used to purchasing traditional media ads and expected the same results with their digital media spending on RoofersCoffeeShop’s website. They did not understand the ROI for advertising with RoofersCoffeeShop’s digital marketing offerings.

Heidi knew there were outcomes, data, and analytics that could be gleaned from their website to prove the value of their digital marketing offerings – especially as audiences shifted more and more to digital media.

How could they create a system to glean that information?

Introduction to a Problem-Solving Partner

Soon afterward, RoofersCoffeeShop was referred to Intrada Technologies to assist with site optimization and analytics reporting.

“By working with Intrada, we were able to put together very clear, simple analytics,” Heidi shared. Intrada provided the reporting that RoofersCoffeeShop needed to build credibility and trustworthiness with their customers.

Not only did Intrada provide Heidi with methods to obtain clear analytics, but they also identified a new problem that would hinder RoofersCoffeeShop’s ability to grow.

Providing Solutions with Technology

At that time, RoofersCoffeeShop’s site was running on a WordPress framework with more than 50 plugins, which began causing performance hiccups, limitations and user issues.

The website continued to grow over the next year until the WordPress platform could not handle the growth. It began to require multiple manual tasks to provide the desired user experience, content delivery and customer analytics.

Intrada had been looking for options to maintain the growth of RoofersCoffeeShop’s website, while also solving the problems. One solution came in the form of merging both the main site and older forum sites. This increased RoofersCoffeeShop’s keyword count and user content causing a surge in search engine traffic and opportunity.

Following this move, Intrada recommended rebuilding the site using the customer directory as the foundation to manage, control, deliver and track all content. This was a new concept from the WordPress module structure and RoofersCoffeeShop was excited to give it a try.

Intrada rebuilt the entire site to deliver content based on user experience and patterns, not pages connected to a directory. This gave the RoofersCoffeeShop website robust features and better functionality.

Revenue Generating Focus

RoofersCoffeeShop’s target audience is roofing contractors and roofing companies, which defined the product they would provide as content and services for their target audience. The RoofersCoffeeShop team wanted their content to be free, so they had to identify another way to generate profits.

Recalling their classified newspaper background, the team focused on positioning RoofersCoffeeShop as a valuable resource. This move attracted roofing contractors and companies and made the website an increasingly attractive advertising venue.

RoofersCoffeeShop adopted sponsored content as a way to generate revenue, while still providing free, high-quality services and content.

“Everything done on the RoofersCoffeeShop site is somehow sponsored by advertisers or partnerships with nonprofits,” Heidi stated. “Everything is free for contractors – except for [our newly developed] R-Club, which gives more benefits and discounts.”

Since everything RoofersCoffeeShop does is sponsored, proving the value of the website and their services through excellent analytics has been critical to their success.

The Next Step – A Full Analytics Dashboard

Following the website rebuild in 2017, RoofersCoffeeShop wanted to provide their customers with a real-time analytic dashboard to show all activity related to advertising visibility and interaction. The back end of the website also needed development to support future growth — including vertical markets.

Intrada recommended using Symfony, a high-performance PHP framework for web development. By switching from a package software like WordPress to a Symfony framework, RoofersCoffeeShop received all the flexibility of custom development and applications needed to perfectly meet their requirements.

“The analytics have made a huge difference in our business and our growth,” Heidi said. “People can watch the data, track it, see it grow. They can see what content is hitting and what isn’t. Now [that customers can see the analytics], they see that they may be getting eyeballs, but perhaps the content isn’t connecting and they need to take a different approach.”

Providing accurate, real-time data to their advertisers validated the value of RoofersCoffeeShop’s offerings.

The site now has the tools to quickly develop generic features, while also supporting a true development environment with detailed error pages, project consistency, website debugging tools, dependency injection (taken from Java) and natively-supported security.

The framework of RoofersCoffeeShop’s site now has the capabilities to build and deliver content. In addition, customers of RoofersCoffeeShop have access to real-time analytics related to any content tagged to their directory — including impressions, source traffic, page views, content information, and social interaction.

Developing Content to Meet Audience Needs and Identifying Delivery Methods – “Read, Listen, Watch^TM”

Heidi and the RoofersCoffeeShop team approached the development of compelling content with their target audience in mind. They developed what their “Read, Listen, Watch^TM” initiative to address generational learning styles and allow people to learn how they want and when they want.

“We constantly ask ourselves, ‘How can we do things that are authentic and really address the industry?’ Then we turn it into content,” said Heidi. “That content helps roofing contractors and companies to grow their businesses.”

The RoofersCoffeeShop team writes articles, produces weekly podcasts, hosts live Q&A Coffee Conversations^TM, develops videos and has recently started RCS Lunch & Learn. They have incorporated many of the up-and-coming digital marketing trends, as shared in Intrada’s 2022 Digital Marketing Trends article.

Quantifying Results

RoofersCoffeeShop President Heidi Ellsworth accepts the 2021 Innovation Award for Coffee Conversations from the Midwest Roofing Contractors Association

“After joining Vickie in 2015, we focused on taking the company to an all new level. Since then, we have grown the business ten times plus. It has been amazing,” said Heidi.

Since 2016, sessions on RoofersCoffeeShop have increased by 300%. Users have increased by 400%. Page views have doubled and organic traffic delivers over 70% of the new users to specific content within the site.

RoofersCoffeeShop also re-launched AskaRoofer.com, a new sister site of RoofersCoffeeShop with over 20 years of blogs, Q&A and extensive roofing information focused on home owners. This new site is running off the same Symfony framework, but publicly works as an independent site. This allows content and website staff to manage content across all sites from a single platform and opens the door for future vertical sites, like HVAC and Plumbing.

RoofersCoffeeShop has received numerous accolades for their content. They received the 2021 Folio: Eddie Award for B2B Social Media/Online Community and the 2019 Folio: Eddie Award for Website B2B Building & Construction with an honorable mention in the B2B Social Media/Online Community category. In 2017, RoofersCoffeeShop received an honorable mention for B2B Website/Online Community in the Construction and Manufacturing category.

Additionally, in 2021, their “Read, Listen, Watch^TM” series was voted the top product in METALCON’s technology category and they received a People’s Choice Award. Finally, the Coffee Conversations series won the 2021 Innovation Award from the Midwest Roofing Contractors Association."

President Heidi J. Ellsworth was also recognized as a Changemaker by Folio: and AdMonster in their 2021 class of Top Women in Media.

Intrada Continues to Support RoofersCoffeeShop and Their Growth

Intrada works with the RoofersCoffeeShop team weekly and is continually adding functions and features to the site — from keyword-driven dynamic content to geo-location classifieds, RSS feeds and landing page marketing campaigns, advertising and e-commerce functions.

Intrada has built their system to monitor usage patterns to help maximize visibility of client content.

“Optimization is a continual effort as we update coding and functions to improve the RoofersCoffeeShop performance. Intrada focuses on many performance functions, from user experience to data delivery and analytic collection,” said Intrada partner, David Steele. “It’s an amazing site and the framework has allowed Intrada to deliver on the promise of growth and function.”

Intrada hosts the RoofersCoffeeShop website and manages custom server configurations to ensure security and quality performance.

“Intrada does development and provides full-support IT for RoofersCoffeeShop, including our Microsoft365 support. Adam and Eric at Intrada work on developing our new products and the website,” said Heidi. “[The Intrada team] does a great job working with my team, understanding roadmaps and making things happen.”

Can Intrada Help Your Business?

Intrada’s development team and processes are result-focused. We recognize the continually changing nature of technology and do not look at a specific platform or vendor as the solution.

Intrada approaches problems by considering our client’s needs and goals. With this in mind, we analyze the problem and identify the best technology tools to achieve the highest function within the client’s budget.

If your company has a unique project or website that is not reaching the desired performance, Intrada Technologies can help. From search engine optimization (SEO) to growing user impressions through digital marketing, or honing your analytics, our experienced team can help.

To learn more, please contact James Haywood via email or by calling (800) 858-5745.