This month we took a a look at our website, bzfurfur.com, with a critical eye and had to make some decisions about what works and what doesn’t.   Two years ago, when we moved off Etsy and decided to launch our own website, we made a lot of decisions about the organization of the site. Not all of those decisions played out the way we had hoped. So we decided it was time for a tune-up. Just like you take your car to the mechanic to make sure everything is operating efficiently and you go to the doctors to get an annual checkup: if you don’t spend the necessary time to keep your website well maintained it is going, at best, be an inconvenience to your customers and, at worst, drive customers away from your products.  So here are the top five things that we recommend you do to keep your website healthy:

Spruce up your site with these five tips

1. Performance: A poor-performing site is going to be a strain on any user. Hi-res pictures are a wonderful way to showcase your products but they tend to be large. Remember that there are still a lot of potential customers who don’t have high-speed internet connections or who might be accessing your website on a mobile device. Are you using plugins on your site? Take a look at how those might be impacting performance. Go one by one and disable plugins from your site to determine if certain ones are consuming more memory/bandwidth and slowing down your site. Use tools like Google Lighthouse (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview) to get metrics around how quickly your site renders and try to boost those stats.
2. Inventory: If you have been running your site for a long time it is very likely that your inventory is out of date. Whether that is old products that you no longer have in stock, incorrect amounts, or incomplete details. Often times we are heading to a market and we put a product up “just to get it in the POS system” without a decent quality product photo or limited product details.  Now is a good time to go through your inventory and make sure everything is as up-to-date and accurate as possible.
3. Search Engine Optimization: You want your site to show up on all the major search engines.  Even if you took the time to optimize your site for search engines when you initially stood it up, the requirements for search engines change all the time.  Make sure you have key words in the titles of all your pages, add meta descriptions, make sure you follow the guidelines for getting your pages indexed for google, getting your products listed on social platforms, and you are that you are reviewing best practices such as Google’s SEO Starter Guide https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
4. Information Architecture: A website is only as good as the people who are using it. If your menus are cluttered, if items don’t show up in your search, or if the layout makes it difficult to navigate users are going to take one look at the site and head off elsewhere. Take the time to use your site: pretend you are a customer and search for something.  Go through the checkout process. Ask friends/family to do the same and provide you with candid feedback. Take the feedback from your own experience as well as that of others and put together a strategy for how to improve the overall user experience to optimize it for connecting your customers and your product.
5. Branding: If your site has undergone many changes your overall branding strategy may have gotten muddied over the years. Fonts, color schemes, logos, and styles could vary wildly across your site. Take this time to determine what those styles are and apply them consistently across all your pages. Make sure that font sizes for paragraphs, headings, navigation, etc are cohesive across all your pages. Think about this in terms of your verbiage as well. Does one page sound fun and quirky whereas another page sounds like something out of a corporate brochure. Use this time to give your website a consistent voice.

What’s next?

These are just a few tips. Maintaining your website is an ongoing process and you are never really done so come back to it frequently and make sure you are giving your users the best experience possible. Have your own suggestions for how to make your site great? Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

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Last week we started our series talking about domain names. With your domain secured it is time to start thinking about where to host your site. This is where the options really start piling up. As you start shopping around you’ll hear things like software-as-a-service, cloud hosting, e-commerce platform, and dedicated hosts. I could fill up the remainder of this post with the various buzzwords around web design. You need to cut through the noise. So, what are your options?

Turn-key Services

All-in-one concierge-type services like Etsy and Shopify will get your store up and running quickly. These types of turn-key services are great as they don’t require you to build a site, worry about taxes and shipping, research how to market your site, and optimize your page for speed. Instead, you just set a few parameters and start listing your products.

With this ease of use, they come with some disadvantages: they aren’t very flexible only offering you a narrow range of designs and features. When they do offer customization they are often al la carte and the costs quickly add up. Additionally, the monolithic design of these sites means it is very hard to set yourself apart from your competitors. Lastly, they often change their marketing and rankings so your products can go from being the first in a list of search results to the last overnight.

“Cookie Cutter” Websites

There are a number of these types of services that allow you to build your own website and, for the most part, they deliver. The two most well-known are Wix and SquareSpace but there are others in this space as well. These are not bad options for someone starting out. They are often fairly cost-effective, have a bunch of templates to pick from, and allow you to sell your products, create blogs, link to social media, add picture galleries, etc to flesh out your website and build a brand.

The major disadvantages are that you need to drive your own traffic to your site, some of the templates can be pretty restrictive in how they can be configured, and it may be difficult to port your site to another service if you are unhappy with the company or decide it is time to grow. 

Publishing Platforms

There are a number of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the market if you want to build and host your website on your own. WordPress, the most well-established of these has been around for ages and is now responsible for something in the range of half the websites on the internet. For the uninitiated WordPress can be daunting. So, if you are going to go this route make sure you are setting aside time to watch YouTube videos or get someone with some experience to give you the rundown.

Once you get a handle on it, however, it can be very powerful allowing for thousands of plugins, and themes. Plus, if you are planning to sell, WooCommerce, WordPress’ sales platform, is pretty mature at this point. If you go this route look at companies like GoDaddy and HostGator which often offer reasonable prices with deep discounts if you are willing to sign up for multiple years. Most offer WordPress one-click installation at no cost. If you are just starting out consider their lowest tier option as it is usually sufficient and should perform reasonably well. 

Hire a freelance web designer

This is going to be the most costly option and should only really be considered if you have a decent size budget for your site and you want something highly customized. A freelance agent or agency will be able to make something that is very unique and customized but could run you anywhere from a few hundred bucks to well into the thousands. Stay away from any freelance developer that offers you an e-commerce website for anything less than $500 because it will, more than likely, be a painful experience that will have you contacting one of the more costly agents not soon afterward to start over from scratch.  Also, be careful of scams.  There are hundreds of companies cold-calling new, small businesses to offer web design solutions. Research local agencies or agencies with good reputations. 

Which is right for me?

If you are using a concierge website or a freelance web designer you should have a very low-touch experience. It will mainly be about getting high-quality pictures of your work, adding products to your catalog, writing blog posts, and promoting your website. For cookie-cutter websites and publishing platforms, you may be investing a lot more time into choosing templates, setting colors, and generally styling your site.

If you have the budget I highly recommend getting a web designer. They understand the market very well and will recommend the things that get people to your website, and keep them there. They will also make sure that your brand is properly represented on your site, something that can be easily lost via some of the other options.

If your budget doesn’t allow for a web designer then it comes down to how tech-savvy you are. If you like getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work then using a publishing platform like WordPress can be extremely effective as you can tweak the site to your heart’s content by choosing different themes, enabling plugins, creating layouts for your posts, and so on. You’ll save yourself a few bucks too but expect that you’ll be spending a lot of time working on the site that could be going into making product

For most people going with one of the cookie-cutter or concierge platforms will suffice, at least in the early stages. They will provide you with a way to offer your products to people without having to learn all the details of how to build an e-commerce website. Eventually, you will probably want to move to something tailored to your company.

What’s next?

Come back next Tuesday and we’ll be talking about search engine optimization. Your website isn’t much if you can’t get it in from of people. Learn how to ensure your website is well-suited for all the major search engines.

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