Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I am a current franchise owner and looking for honest feedback from the Start Up community. I would like to know if my website, www.absolutelychemdry.com  would get you interested enough to book an appointment for a quality carpet cleaning.

So often carpets are the last to have any sort of cleaning done, yet we spend all hours of the week on them, delivering all kinds of goodies collected on our shoes as we walk the streets. It would be nice to know if my web page would encourage you to call for an appointment.

Looking for friendliness to the page, is eat easy to move around and find things, is the information relative, is there enough to look at, too much to look at, etc.

Please advise

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Mike,

Two observations:

1. When I went to load the site, nothing happened for about 15 to 20 seconds. I hit the reload button, but the same thing happened again. I looked to see what was trying to be loaded and it said it was trying to load info from http://chem-dry.net/. I am guessing this is your parent company. You may need to investigate with them to see why your franchise site is loading so slow if it is drawing info from their main site. That's trouble number one - clients won't wait that long to see if a site will load - I waited because I wanted to help you with  your review.

2. You may not like this suggestion, but the name of your business "Absolutely Chem-Dry" raises red flags for me. Two fold on the red flags: A. Chem-Dry doesn't tell me anything about what your business does. What is "chem dry" is my first thought? B. The word Chem puts me off as a consumer. With the bulk of consumers wanting to have less chemicals in their lives, chem in the name is a disadvantage. If you don't believe this, consider that the large business that was formerly name ChemLawn renamed themselves TruGreen recently.

If you need to keep the name, you'll need to do some serious work to counter the first reaction of "oh no, I don't want chemicals all over my carpets!"  Maybe you could explain why the solutions used in your business are not a danger. Take a look at the marketing and advertising the SC Johnson company is doing for its consumer cleaning products these days. They're still using chemcials, but they're adding transparency (of information) so the consumers feel safe in choosing the specific products of SC Johnson.

Addressing these two issues seem paramount to getting customers to look at your services, in my opinion.

Wishing you success.

Chirpy-me covered most bases, and I agree with him that the redirection process is too slow and potentially scary for clients who expected another site to show up in their address bar. The picture is cute, but it doesn't give a clear idea of your business. You may not want to use so many different colors for the homepage texts to faciliate readability.

Absolutely,

When I tried pulling up your web site, it came up pretty quick... but perhaps on others computer it might be slow or not pulling up quickly...

Mike, there are various things you have to be careful when using a Franchise's dynamically-built-website.

One: The content that they are providing you is a cookie cutter model. You share the same content as any other franchise owner.

Two: Since Chem-dry already has a marketing plan for you, the aesthetic part of the web site is very dull. The truth is they don't care whether you sell or not... they have your money...

Three: It doesn't really talk about your experience, it just tells me the company's overall experience and years in business. You really need to personalize your landing page.

Also, people get discouraged when they see the chem-dry/absolutely.az this shows me that you can be either a spammer or again, a franchise owner.... And like Chirpy said, the name chem, can either make you or break you...

My suggestion... Purchase a domain name that suits your needs... And, get a 3 pager web site built for you... and make it more personal... Explain to the people that you have the experience and that you won't be using chemicals in their homes.. Now if you need some sord of back up for credibility just say that you are an authorized dealer for chem-dry... This may work better for you.. and after all its your own product, chem-dry will sell so they wont get pissed off...

Many thanks to all who took the time to provide me with good honest feedback. I plan to review this feedback with our VP of Marketing and see if some adjustments can be made to enhance my canned web site. Again - Many thanks