Specialty Stores Should Have Websites
Living in a relatively small country, not everything we’re looking for is available here. There was a time when we really wanted to purchase some Auralex foam for some audio recording we were doing. We searched online and went to a lot of physical stores. No success. More recently we’ve been searching for specialty ingredients and equipment for some Christmas baking. After a long search and a lot of leg work, we did manage to find the ingredients and equipment we were after. How did we find them? Through the business’ websites.
Out of all the businesses that we think should have websites, it should be those that sell specialty goods. There is a benefit to having a website. So many people like us do their searches online first before heading out to the store. Having a website for the unique product range would certainly bring in more customers. This unique range would also be enough to send the store to the top of search engine ranking, which mean less need to pay for advertising for top spot. After that, it’s pretty much be a done deal between customer and business (it would have been what would’ve happened had we found a local online or physical store that sold Auralex foam).
Specialty stores don’t have to have an online store, just a well laid out website to showcase the specialty products they sell. Provide a location and people like us will visit the place. We understand building and maintaining a website can be expensive. So, it doesn’t have to be one that requires a paid webhost, designers and coders. A free hosted blog on the product range from a place like WordPress would be good alternative.
A website, an online presence would go a long way into making the discovery a lot easier. We had believed that very little in the way of specialty goods was available in New Zealand. But now, having had some success in finding them, we think it’s not that no specialty goods are available in New Zealand, it’s that they’re not visible enough to be discovered.
P.S. Happy New Year! May 2012 bring lots of joy and prosperity!
WEBSITES OF INTEREST:
In case there is anyone looking to start up a website, at Consumer Rankings, they’ve published the 10 most popular web hosting companies (all of them overseas). We hear that Bluehost is a good web host to go with, and judging by their ranking, a lot of people agree with that, too.
Another option is to have a hosted blog from WordPress. This is not just a site providing blogs. There are full functioning sites with search, categorisation, social media integration and shopping carts in WordPress. With their large database of themes, there’s sure to be a design that matches the look and feel of anyone looking to promote their business more, too. There are plenty of plugins available to perform all kinds of functions, taking the out the need to write or install complicated code. The ease and flexibility of WordPress sites makes setting up an online presence a breeze.
We like to ramble on about a range of things: topics include television, film, music, technology, design, and information we think you may find helpful/useful; so where better to ramble on about the said topics than on a blog? 



