When we first started the LadyBug Shop we knew very little about websites and eCommerce. Fortunately, we knew Scott Livingood, a local website designer. Several years earlier Scott had built an “advertising” website for us for another business. This time the job was bigger—since we wanted to sell our products via the Internet we needed a “catalog” and “shopping cart” in addition to information about the shop and about ladybugs. Scott’s solution was to divide the website into two parts. For the purely informational pages (which includes the home page) he used a popular user-friendly software called FrontPage. A good description of this software is provided at Wikipedia. The plan was that I would also learn to use FrontPage so that I could make changes to this portion of the website any time I wanted to do so. Unfortunately, I have still not found time to study the program, so I still have to ask Scott to make changes when they are necessary. (But I have the FrontPage manual and plan to study it some day!) For the shopping cart Scott turned to a local software development company, Delaware.net, who had developed excellent “shopping cart” software for small businesses such as LadyBug Shop. (You can find out about this software at www.store-logic.com.) Their shopping cart allows Zoe and myself to easily add product photos, descriptions and sales information whenever we have new products. And it takes care of putting together orders as customers select items from the catalog. It provides a number of other useful services such as handling credit card and shipping information and allowing customers to use discount codes that we have promotions or special sales. We have been very happy with our website and like having worked with local individuals and companies to put it together. Today we keep about 500 products in our website catalog—which makes us the largest provider of ladybug products on the World Wide Web!
Friday, September 7, 2007
Building Our Website
When we first started the LadyBug Shop we knew very little about websites and eCommerce. Fortunately, we knew Scott Livingood, a local website designer. Several years earlier Scott had built an “advertising” website for us for another business. This time the job was bigger—since we wanted to sell our products via the Internet we needed a “catalog” and “shopping cart” in addition to information about the shop and about ladybugs. Scott’s solution was to divide the website into two parts. For the purely informational pages (which includes the home page) he used a popular user-friendly software called FrontPage. A good description of this software is provided at Wikipedia. The plan was that I would also learn to use FrontPage so that I could make changes to this portion of the website any time I wanted to do so. Unfortunately, I have still not found time to study the program, so I still have to ask Scott to make changes when they are necessary. (But I have the FrontPage manual and plan to study it some day!) For the shopping cart Scott turned to a local software development company, Delaware.net, who had developed excellent “shopping cart” software for small businesses such as LadyBug Shop. (You can find out about this software at www.store-logic.com.) Their shopping cart allows Zoe and myself to easily add product photos, descriptions and sales information whenever we have new products. And it takes care of putting together orders as customers select items from the catalog. It provides a number of other useful services such as handling credit card and shipping information and allowing customers to use discount codes that we have promotions or special sales. We have been very happy with our website and like having worked with local individuals and companies to put it together. Today we keep about 500 products in our website catalog—which makes us the largest provider of ladybug products on the World Wide Web!
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2 comments:
It's great that you are getting into blogging. It really helps to show your clients how to do business with you, and to share tips. Thanks for the mention on Store-Logic. We are implementing a newsletter manager into Store-Logic now that you will get for free. Thanks for the nice words, and for being a customer!
To help you with marketing, I have added a link to the LadyBug shop to the Delaware.com shopping page. Enjoy!
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