Meet Matt Hudson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Hudson.

Matt, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was still in school for graphic design and photography when I got my first client back in 2006. You know how it is, your friend knows you can do something they can’t and ask you to help with it. After we launched their site I got two more, than more until at some point I was making more money in web design than photography. So I created a new company to work with photographers doing custom web design. We did that for a short bit and then discovered that there were WordPress themes that you could export templates with and sell.

Building website isn’t easy. Something we all know too well. I came from a photography background photographing portraits and weddings for six years and I saw a huge need to fill when it comes to photography websites. There wasn’t a lot of options in the mid 2000’s. When there finally was, they weren’t very good. I saw a need to make that whole process easier.

We partnered with a theme company to get them to push a new type of marketplace that allowed us to resell templates made with their theme, and that skyrocketed us for the first few years. When the company started to make enough money, we decided to rebrand, rename, and restart from scratch in 2012. Which brings us to the company we are today.

Has it been a smooth road?
It hasn’t always been easy. Since I’m not a developer, and we have no other employees on our team, we rely on someone else’s software to provide a product. Companies like Showit and ProPhoto who provide the themes and we create and sell templates in their marketplaces. So we’re totally at the whim of those companies when they release a new product or change the theme in anyway.

There was a time in the early 2010’s when responsive design started to take over static design. Responsive design is where a website will resize itself to fit any type of screen you’re viewing it on. Unfortunately, one of the themes we were using was in the middle of a refresh, and we missed the ball early on when that change started to be standard, and that hurt us a bit. We lost a lot of our customers to competitors. So it’s not always been a smooth road.

For a time we also struggled with not getting overbooked and overworked with clients. Some clients put us so far behind back to back that it took us 2 years to climb out of that hole.

Then, it only became easier to build and do your website yourself over time. Companies like Squarespace, and Wix were starting to boom, and so suddenly there was more competition everywhere. It’s never been easier to start a website from scratch. So we’re constantly trying to keep up with technology, and making our products the best they can be.When times are slow, we use our services to back up our product which levels things out, but our end goal is to end up hiring some more employees and expanding into even more markets.

We also have 50x more competitors and companies doing it. Building templates from other people’s themes has been a thing for a long time, but we’ve seen a huge growth in our niche exploding because it’s become easier than ever to call yourself a “designer” with no education and just a little DIY know how. That’s something we deal with constantly.

Please tell us about the company.
We’re primarily a web design company that offers design services and website theme templates for photographers and other small businesses. We offer a little bit of everything in terms of services; branding, custom web design, IT services, I have a little background in all of it so I can do a lot of things, and I specialize in a lot of software. We sell templates using the ProPhoto WordPress theme, and the Showit platform, but we’ve done work for clients in Divi and Elementor themes, as well as Squarespace, and Wix. We’ve also custom designed websites from scratch without using a theme or template.

We were the very first ones to really take someone else’s theme and sell templates for it. We approached a developer about opening a marketplace, and we worked together to do that. We stayed in the photography niche, and from there it just exploded. We’re one of the original designers in the field that started it and are still around today. I’m very proud of that. I’ve seen lots of designers come and go over the years. Sometimes it’s just easier to grab a paycheck than to try to survive, and I get that, but we’ve held fast and doubled down and that’s been successful for us.

I’d say our quality of service and years of experience put us above a lot of our competitors. I spent two years putting services on hold developing a new process so that we can design a customer a fully custom website using a template in five to seven days.

We’re also super strict on deadlines and don’t put up with delays of any kind. It’s the biggest pitfall of any designer to let the customer put you 10 months behind and once you get behind it’s almost impossible to get out of. We offer high quality work in the least amount of time we can make it. The time spent to work on those processes was 110% worth it.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The future is definitely drag and drop web design. No code, no photoshop, just a blank canvas and place things where you want it and it spits out a working website. There’s only a couple of companies out there pursuing it and making it work. The technology isn’t quite there yet, but it will be the next big shift in web design.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lalunecreative.com

Image Credit:
My personal image is shot by Christi Martin Photography – https://www.christimartin.com/

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