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They Don’t Have One
Even if you never plan on selling a single item online, you should still have a website for your store. More and more people look online for information. Having a basic website is an inexpensive way to help your customers find you. Plus, it’s giving your customers a way to easily spread the word about you and your store. These days “word of mouth” is just as easily “word of twitter/facebook/pinterest/email”.
It Doesn’t Look Professional
Your website may be the first impression a customer has of your store. Make sure it looks good. A good looking website doesn’t have to be an expensive website.
It’s Not Updated
Sometimes I do a Google search and find a website for a store. In bright, bold letters the website lists their new winter store hours. This would be great- except it’s currently July. If you are going to list seasonal information on your website, make sure it gets updated. You can easily have a word press based site set up that you can update yourself, or pay your webmaster a small amount to update the store hours, etc for you. Any professional web designer should be able to update your site in a timely fashion.
As a customer, what complaints do you have about websites or lack of websites for local stores?
Yarn store owners, what barriers do you come across when getting a website for your store? If you’d like more personalized advice, e-mail me at support (at) poetryinyarn (dot) com.
Perhaps I’m a snob, but I’m turned off by really cheap looking websites with poor photos of the store. If a store’s website looks like it was a geocities page made by a 12 year old with some HTML skills, I’m suspecting the quality of yarn they carry. (I don’t know why I make that assumption!)
I dislike when the address is in tiny font all the way at the bottom of the page (and nowhere else!) because sometimes I’m pulling up the site on my phone in order to get directions.
My biggest pet peeve is when you see that they have a shopping cart . . . and nothing is set up to work with it – you can’t order, you can’t even see what’s in stock. Mostly I’m not looking to online order from LYSs – I’ll just go in and get something, or call if I’m DISO something specific.
But I hate it when the shopping cart is a dead end.
I can definitely understand that frustration. A good web designer should be able to hide the shopping cart feature until they site is actually able to sell things online.
If a website is your first impression of a place, bad photos are definitely not good.
I know what you mean about directions. The worst problem I’ve had is when the address is part of a picture (.jpg) file and not actual text. Instead of being able to copy and paste to get directions on my phone, I had to memorize it and quickly switch to the map app and type it in.