What problems can happen when you’re ready to sell gift baskets online? Here’s five things about your website you need to know before you start.
Web warnings
You started a gift basket business, and marketing is going well after reading the definitive marketing article. However, the one piece of the puzzle you don’t have is a website.
You feel exposed and like a fraud when someone asks,
“Do you have a website?”
Finally — you take the plunge and decide it’s time to get online.
Your fingers are crossed hoping that when finished, it’s done right. But what’s right?
Right is when you:
- Participate in all aspects of website creation, from vision to launch and maintenance
- Test the site to ensure that the links go where visitors want to go
- Discover popular pages so you know what visitors are looking for most often
Plans may can go wrong, such as if you don’t:
Research gift basket websites to see what you want and what you don’t want.
Look at competing sites to decide which parts of what they have and offer are what you want to add in your virtual shop.
Select the username and password to enter the administrative side.
If you don’t choose the words to access the site’s dashboard, the person creating the site can take a long vacation (disappear without warning), lock you out (no access to your site to make changes), and create any other type of havoc.
Create a schedule to change the home page according to the season or occasion.
Not having time to maintain your website is no excuse. You must make time. If not, visitors will not return because the site will seem abandoned.
Read the rules of site and domain name ownership before choosing a host.
The policy of some hosting plans (the free and super-cheap ones) state that if you change hosts (have another company maintain your site), you cannot transfer the URL and/or the site’s contents. You must start all over building your brand.
Decide how you will market the site so people visit.
You don’t think that visitors will suddenly arrive and sales will magically appear just because you’re online, do you? Coca Cola and McDonald’s are well known, but they still market robustly. You can do the same with 104 easy-to-do marketing tips in the e-books Gift Basket Marketing, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.
Which of these “go wrong” methods are you guilty of committing. Now that five things about your website you need to know are revealed, what will you do in the future to correct it so visitors become clients?
