Website Evolution

I wrote about website redesigns for SEO recently: redesigns to improve overall quality of a website, usability of a website, and search friendliness of a website. Today, I'd like to share the evolution of a website over a number of years. The site in question is that of A Plus Educational Supply, a brick and mortar school supply store in a small town.

Here's how the site started:


It looked like this for over a year. I didn't know the owners at the time, so I have no theories on why that should have been the case. But this is basically the equivalent of a phone book listing. It's better than not being online at all, but it certainly doesn't take advantage of the power of the internet.

After a year or so, the site moved on to this look, which it kept for several more years:



A site like this is still like a phone book listing, but this did at least have a link to the store's catalog, so there was some additional value to it. The effect of having "coming soon" messages on your website for five or six years is not going to be positive, but again it's better than not having a website at all.

This is where I came in. The site was getting some traffic, and a few orders, but not enough to pay for itself. The owner, Cindy Magness, said that she knew she had to have a website, but that it seemed like a waste. She was spending a few hundred a year on it, and it brought in that much in sales, but not in profits.

Because of the domain age, she had respectable PageRank and came up first on search for the name of her company, but otherwise didn't see much traffic from search.

This site actually had a content management system which would have allowed Cindy to update her site, but she didn't know that, and wasn't prepared to take advantage of the fact. It seemed clear that she needed a professionally-designed site. However, she also needed to keep her stock catalog -- creating her own e-commerce solution for a frequently-updated inventory of 5,000 SKUs wasn't a cost-effective or a practical option. Since she wasn't ready to go with a custom web page, I suggested that she have the company that took care of her catalog make a homepage for her. I wrote up the text and the meta language, Cindy provided the images, and we sent it off to the large company. Here's what they came up with:



As well as having onsite optimization for search, this site also had ongoing search engine marketing, as I did blogging and linkbuilding for it.

Traffic soon doubled, and sales tripled. While the downturn in the economy did hit this retail store, sales at the website continued to top that of previous years each month, and they've bounced back by now.

After eight months with this homepage, though, Cindy was still not completely happy with it. The results were good, but it's not a custom site and it doesn't look like one. The client also had more understanding of what the web could do for her, and wanted to branch out. She wanted to have dynamic content, to offer e-books and other items the stock catalog didn't carry, and to have a design that showed her own style.

Sticking with the stock catalog, we found a designer who could capture Cindy's vision. We're moving her homepage to professional hosting, with access so that I can update it for her. The new site should go live soon, and here is its new look:



What's the takeaway from this story?

• We have to recognize that the cost of the multiple versions of the site adds up to more than the cost of starting with a custom site. Sometimes you're just not ready to take the plunge, or the funds aren't in place all at once, but this is an inescapable consequence of doing "just for now" versions of your website.
• There is also an opportunity cost. Years of sales at the current level would have resulted in a far higher overall return on Cindy's investment, compared with what actually took place.
• That said,we should also recognize the benefits of having had a website -- any website -- for the length of time that Cindy has had hers. Domain age is an important factor in PageRank (Google's decision about how worthy your site is), and a website that just gives your business's name and contact info is still a web presence. Having a site of limited usefulness is better than having none.
  
• Being willing to make changes is also a good thing. Cindy didn't have the information she needed to make the best possible decisions about her website -- those are easy to make in hindsight, but Cindy works in an industry which has only recently begun to move beyond the stock catalog. I worked in that industry myself, and I can confirm that conference discussions of e-commerce always centered around the worthlessness of websites. Once Cindy was able to see beyond that, she was bold enough to move ahead with that new vision.
  

What's in the future for your website?

Stumble It!