Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello,

I am relatively new to this website but, I have a part-time home-based wedding stationary business called Simply Beautiful Stationary. For the past few years, it has been mainly a local business but, I am attemtping to broaden my customer base. I have created a website www.sbstationary.com using Yahoo SiteBuilder. I have recently greatly increased my product inventory and I find that SiteBuilder is a bit of a pain to use when you have more than a few products to offer (I probably have more than 100 now).

My first question, being a novice in this area, is what changes do I need to make to my website to make it more "user-friendly" and easier to navigate? Please make any comments on what is good and bad about the site as I am still in the process of polishing it and adding all of my products (I only have a few on there now)

My second question is, is there a software program that will make adding all of my information to the website easier than the Yahoo software?

Thanks.

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Visit me at www.sbstationary.com

Hello

I looked at your site, which looks nice, however, I was struke that your home page color and your other pages didn`t seem to have a coordinated color scheme. Brown doesn`t represent a color I`d use fr what you do. It`s an accountant kind of color--stable, down to earth, not creative.

The font choice could add something--your choice isn`t creative either.

When you ask about an easier software, if you change now you will have to input all of your inventory again because each of these companies usually don`t use transferrable templates. Years ago I had a rug business and the template wasn`t hard, but it wasn`t a snap either. One of the things I had to do was input

keywords so the site will be optimized. Did you do that?

To get customers, you`ll need traffic and that deals with being found, which is SEO (optimatization). So before you do anything else, I`d suggest you plan and focus on your target market. Optimize what you have now and see how you are doing--what sells and what doesn`t.

I hope that this has helped.

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Leslie,your business doctor

Wordwarrior,

Thank you very much for your advice. I used keywords on every page, I am still learning about SEO and I will update the page as I learn more.

I appreciate your suggestions about the color and font changes and will work on it. I just used the defaults for that particular template. But, I agree, for a stationery business, the font needs to be fancier.

As for the pages that are not the same color scheme as my home pages and other pages in my site... the companies that produce the thermographed invitations provided those particular sites so, I don`t really know how to get them to match with my site. Maybe the best thing would be to match my site to those since I will probably take your suggestion and change the colors anyway.

Since my business deals primarily with wedding and special occasion stationery (although I am getting ready to branch out into business stationery and scrapbooking) for now, my target market is naturally brides, grooms, graduates, new mothers/father looking for birth announcements, etc. My problem is that I am a single mother with very small children (2, 11 mos. and one on the way!!) and a demanding full-time job (I`m a Chemical Engineer) and I don`t have very much time to devote to the upkeep. At the same time, I don`t really want to devote a lot of money to this venture until it gets off the ground a little more. But, I wanted to get my website the way I really wanted it before I focused on advertising. I don`t want potential customers to come to a sub-par website.

I hope that others view this post and give feedback whether it be positive or negative.

Thanks...

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Visit me at www.sbstationary.com

You might try to rework your Carlson Craft template to at least match the colors of your home website.

SEO: Think about what words to use for the "title" of each page. The title tag is an important factor in SE results. For example, your "professional invites" page has "professional" as the title. I`m not sure people looking for invitations will search on the single word "professional". You are competitng with a variety of unrelated sites that use "professional".

~Roland

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