Failing is no fun, but it's such a valuable learning experience. Meet my client, Paul from Washington state, who failed his way to success growing dahlias. Paul was referred to me by a very kind acquaintance. At first we were talking about a possiblity to help do a makeover for a Master's Gardener group in his area. The more we talked, he was interested in improving his ecommerce store selling dahlia tubers so there we went.
Paul's original website was a 3 page website. It was a basic ecommerce store setup that he created by himself...a home page, a product page (which he took down every year after his annual sale season ended), and a contact page . At 75 years old, a former Senior Vice President at a major food company, I was very impressed he built his very own website and got everything setup. However, there's always room for improvements.
His products, dahlia tubers, are seasonal which he sells once a year in springtime. His home page was very bare and there was nothing that people could look at/read when visiting his website after his annual sale season. We could really leave some helpful/great information from his weath of knowledge year-round to help other dahlia lovers succeed the same way he did - I thought.
From that point, I created a plan which consisted of new website structure, content plus a lot more photos from his gorgeous dahlia farm. We did a complete overhaul on his homepage so visitors who land on his website at any time of the year can get a feel of his beautiful dahlias and have a way to be notified if they're want to be notified of his next sale date. They can browse through photos of his dahlias from a previous year, get to know who he is, and learn tips on growing them.
With every small business, the best thing you can do is to clearly list information about your products, services, process, and policies so your customers don't have to wait for you to respond because you have all of the information on your website. That will also help you quickly reference or send a link instead of answering the same questions 100 times or more.
We added an FAQs page, an About page, a Planting Care & Tips, a Monthly Care page, a few internal links to help customers quickly get from one section of the website to another, and a call-to-action to his products. We also enabled a pop-up which helped him build his email list of subscribers/potential customers for the following year. Ready to see www.PapaPaulsDahlilas.com website? Click a play button to see his stunning dahlias in a video below. His website is built on Weebly with Square ecommerce integration.
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