Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I`m a young entrepreneur and am starting up a college laundry and dry cleaning business, called Student Suds. This fall, we`ll be servicing 6 schools and hoping to expand in future years. I put a lot of work into this web site and it finally went live early this week.

The copy is geared towards a younger audience as well as the parents of college students. I tried to make it entertaining and funny. I wanted to avoid a `hard sell` and give customers a good feeling about our company. I also wanted to strike a balance between using `college humor` and also appealing to older parents of the college students, many of whom will pay for their child`s service.

Anyway, please critique and comment!

www.studentsuds.com

What do I know? (Our site gets no calls).

My first impression is that your site is great! I get the idea right away with the suds in the logo and the student looking at his watch. Really neat.

The text is kind of long and you need to break it up a little with a few bolds or links or something.

I would like to see some really clear, true FAQ`s, like: how much is it? How OFTEN does pickup occur? What ifs?

cute, great idea. I`d target parents, too.

I keep getting the question, `how much does it cost". If you go to the `services` tab, and then go into `laundry plans` you can view the different prices. However, the word `services` might not be the best way to advertise that that is where the prices are located. I might relabel that page as "Sign Up" so that people know this is where they can view that type of info.

The only concern I have about the copy is that its a bit too goofy and loses the point. Do you think I`ve given enough of the benefits of the service? Do the jokes get in the way of the message?

LOL! I totally love that front page picture! As they say, "a picture`s worth a thousand words," and that one does it! :-D Most Excellent!

Another neat little cliche: Sometimes less is more! :-) Y`know?

Your content is too small, meaning the typface and font size. Make it bigger. There are too many words; use bullet points instead.

This doesn`t take a rocket scientist, but it DOES take knowledge of laundry, and many kollidje kids don`t know how to do that.

Just wipe out about 80% of all the text and junk, focus on bigger typeface, good contrasting colors, and make it fast.

• Oh....someone to do my laundry! Cool!
• How much?
• What do I gotta do?
• Oh yah....how do I make sure I get all my stuff back?

That`s all you need. :-)

That`s interesting. I never even noticed that I do have a lot of copy. I went to great lengths to make the copy interesting, hired a really good and clever copywriter, so it would be painful to delete most of it. But, like you said, sometimes less is more. I`ll have to run that by a couple more people to get opinions. 

Exactly Craig! The site has more words than needed to communicate your message.

There are two distinct markets.. the student and the Moms (parents). For students, real simple what where how. For Moms why and how (more words is ok). Also, marketing to parents to purchase this is like buying the college meal plan. Or buy for your college man/woman so you`ll know at least smoething is getting washed (and you won`t be faced with bags of laundry the next home visit).

~Roland

 

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One other majorly important feature you need---I was thinking about it in the shower---how bizarre is THAT!? LOL!!

You should have a tab where mom and dad can sign up to have Billy`s or Stephanie`s laundry done for them, with monthly billing statements to the parents.

:-) As Roland said....

Parents can sign up their kids using their credit card. I want to keep it so that all money is paid up front. But, parents can go to `services` then laundry plans, and purchase a plan for their kids. 

So how come we didn`t notice any of that? :-)

It doesn`t matter that you expended effort to write interesting copy. Anyone who can write doesn`t consider it an effort, so deleting 80% is routine. What matters a whole lot more is that a) you`re getting too many questions about how much it costs, and b) nobody`s noticing your "Services" tab.

I appreciate the feedback. I am just a little confused as to what I should replace the homepage text with.

About the services tab, I think I`ll be changing it to "Sign Up"