Devonia Water: No more drowning in phone calls.

The Devonia project holds a special place in my portfolio because it was the first time at Upshot I got to lead all aspects of a project from start to finish. Up until then, I'd been focused on completing projects inherited from my predecessor, so this felt like a real opportunity to show what I could do. Devonia came to us with a frustrating problem that many small businesses face: they had a website, but it wasn't actually helping their business run efficiently, and it didn't match their rebrand.

Customers who wanted to order water had to fill out a basic contact form asking how many crates they needed, then Devonia staff would have to call them back to manually create the order. It was time-consuming for everyone involved and created unnecessary friction in what should have been a simple purchasing process. The manual process also led to errors and delays that frustrated both customers and staff.

During our kick-off meetings, it became clear that Devonia's vision was bigger than just a new website – they wanted to streamline their entire ordering process. Ideally, customers would be able to place orders online that would automatically feed into their CRM and internal sales spreadsheets. They were looking to transition from a manual paper trail process to an automated digital system, but this required strategic steps to overhaul their backend rather than one giant leap.

My challenge was to create a stepping-stone solution that would significantly improve their current process while fitting within their available resources. I started by mapping out both their current customer journey and their ideal future state. The gap was significant, but I could see opportunities to make meaningful improvements without requiring a massive technical overhaul.

My solution was an interactive ordering form that would visually show customers exactly what they were ordering – how many bottles, how many crates, total cost, everything laid out clearly. While it wouldn't be fully automated, it would capture much more detailed information and eliminate a lot of the back-and-forth phone calls. The wireframes went through several iterations as we refined the ordering flow.

I wanted to make sure that customers felt confident about their order before submitting it, and that Devonia staff would receive all the information they needed to process orders quickly. The visual design focused on clarity and trust, using clear product imagery and real-time calculations to help customers understand exactly what they were purchasing and when it would be delivered.

Building the interactive order form required custom functionality beyond standard Webflow capabilities. I created a system where customers could adjust quantities and see real-time updates to their order total and delivery requirements. The integration challenge was connecting this data to Devonia's existing business systems using Make.com to automatically populate their CRM and update their internal sales tracking spreadsheets.

Throughout the development process, I maintained regular communication with the Devonia team, making sure the solution would actually work with their day-to-day operations. There's no point building something technically clever if it doesn't solve the real business problem. The custom JavaScript ensured the ordering interface worked smoothly across all devices and provided clear feedback at every step.

The finished website successfully transformed Devonia's ordering process. Customers could now place detailed orders with confidence, and the staff could process them much more efficiently. While it wasn't the fully automated system they originally envisioned, it was a significant step forward that immediately improved their operations and customer satisfaction.

Leading this project taught me a lot about balancing client ambitions with practical constraints. Sometimes the best solution isn't the most technically advanced one – it's the one that solves the most pressing problems within the available resources. The success came from understanding the real business needs and creating a solution that worked within real-world limitations.