As a florist you need to reach out to potential customers through all outlets. You more than likely have a web site dedicated to your business. Today, it is almost imperative that you do have a web site to assist new and existing customers. While not having a web site for your business can truly hurt you, having a web site that is useless can hurt you as well. If you have a site that is not current and user-unfriendly, then you are setting yourself up for online failure. You want your web site to benefit the florist, so use these tips to make sure you have the best homepage on your florist’s web site.
It is certain that the contact information should be easily found on your homepage. This includes your telephone number (for easy-to-place phone orders), your email contact information, and your business address (for the walk-in customer). If someone was to go to your site and not find all of that on the first page, you can almost guarantee they will not be placing their order through your florist. Also, you should have your logo on the homepage. This may be how some customers recognize who you are.
Keep in mind that people are not going to take a whole chunk of their time to investigate what you offer. If you create floral arrangements for only certain events, make it known on your homepage. Let your customers know right out what it is that you do and offer.
As a business you should keep the homepage looking neat and clean. Web sites that are full of loud colored and varying fonts look very unprofessional. Florists are artists, and if your homepage looks cluttered and messy, potential customers may get the impression that all of work is that way.
Size definitely matters in regards to you homepage. You need to be sure that when your homepage loads on a monitor the viewer will not have to do any scrolling from left-to-right. Make the page wide enough for an average monitor. When it comes to photos you also need to be sure you are not posting photos that take way too long to load on the page and that take up the entirety of the screen. Impatient people will not wait for it to load and those who do wait will not be impressed by the unprofessional appearance.
You will need to keep the web site up-to-date. If your last update is from 2007, then it looks to people like you are not doing a single thing. Keep the current news or updates section of your homepage current. You can also use your social media feeds to keep everyone up-to-date with happenings. If you find that you do not have the time to keep it current then ditch the section all together. It’s better to not have a current news section than to have an outdated one.
“Web sites that are full of loud colored and varying fonts look very unprofessional.” I totally agree with this. There are so many websites that could be so much better. They look like they have been made by a 5 year old child and are not fit for a business.
Same websites have not updated their design for years and they still wonder why their business is suffering. The home page the the first thing people see when they arrive on a site. It is going to make a first impression and everyone should make sure that’s a good one not a bad one.