Shina .H. Bello

Web & Product Support for Barn2 Plugins and C80 Limited

Product and Marketing Support for Barn2 Plugins

I got the opportunity to work with Barn2 Plugins after connecting with the founder, Katie Keith, through Twitter (now X), where I regularly engaged with her posts and conversations within the WordPress ecosystem. At the time, I had a strong interest in understanding how successful WordPress plugin companies operate internally, especially around product support, marketing, documentation, and customer experience. Even though the company was not actively hiring then, I pitched myself directly to Katie, and we agreed on a six-month part-time arrangement.

During that period, I worked across support, SEO, content operations, and marketing assistance. I conducted research on social media and digital marketing trends within the WordPress space, analyzed how competitors positioned themselves online, and identified potential opportunities for community engagement and audience growth.

I also worked on SEO and website improvement tasks, including implementing optimized meta titles, descriptions, and H1 headings across over 15 pages and more than 100 blog posts based on recommendations from an SEO audit conducted by the marketing manager. I further improved accessibility and on-page SEO by researching and writing alt-text descriptions for images across product pages, blog content, and the company knowledge base.

On the content side, I assisted with organizing topic clusters for existing blog and website content to strengthen internal linking and search visibility. I also collaborated with the company’s video producer by researching high-performing YouTube content within similar plugin and WordPress-related niches, documenting effective headline styles, thumbnail patterns, and video ideas, while also carrying out keyword research using VidIQ to support video discoverability.

Part of my role also involved customer-facing support through HelpScout. I handled level-one support requests, including pre-sale plugin questions, refund processing, and resolving simpler usability-related issues before escalating more technical problems to the second-tier support team when necessary. This gave me direct exposure to how product companies manage customer relationships, support expectations, and operational workflows at scale.

I also drafted email copy for re-engagement campaigns and plugin license renewal reminders, contributing to the company’s broader retention and customer communication efforts.

Overall, the experience was very eye-opening for me because it exposed me to the operational side of running a successful WordPress product company beyond just building websites.

Web & Product Support for C80 Limited

At C80 Limited, a government IT consulting company, I was involved in training and supporting users for web platforms built for government agencies and parastatals. My role was mostly focused on helping people actually understand and use the platforms comfortably after deployment, especially users who were not very technical.

One of the projects I worked on was LegiPro, a platform built for the National Institute of Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) to help departments and units manage and track research requests more efficiently, instead of relying heavily on manual processes where requests could easily get delayed, misplaced, or forgotten.

As part of the rollout, we organized a three-day physical training program for different batches of Senior Legislative Aides from the Nigerian National Assembly, and I led the training sessions for the platform. I guided participants through how to use the platform, explained workflows in simpler terms, answered questions, and assisted users during practical sessions to make sure they were comfortable using the system in their day-to-day work. I also provided follow-up support communication around the platform after the training sessions.

Because of NDAs signed as part of my role, I cannot publicly share deeper operational or technical details about the platform itself, but the experience gave me hands-on exposure to user onboarding, product training, and support within government work environments where many users are interacting with new web platforms for the first time.

I have also attached photos from some of the training sessions as proof of participation and involvement in the project rollout.