Start Up Kids Line

Getting an online boutique up and running.

March 23rd, 2007

It seems like I get so caught up in our manufacturing processes that I rarely touch on the online boutique startup process. Oh my, oh my. After we went through hell and got ripped off by developers -if anybody ever comes across Hand Crafted Webs or the Yellow-Llama, run fast and run far – they will rip you off. They can talk a good talk, but they don’t do anything to back it up. They can do a decent mock-up in Photoshop and get you thinking everything will be grand, but they won’t go beyond that. I will write this story completely in another post, because I’ve promised many people I would do so, and because I have a ton of emails to back it up; and because I know when I do my post on them, it will show up in searches and hopefully save many others.

Let me suffice it to say that their last email to me was requesting a contact address so they could send some legal papers to us; it’s been months and they are apparently incapable of performing a search online for our contact information, or simply locating the contact information provided on our website. I’d laugh if we hadn’t been totally and completely ripped off. But, right, the story is for another post. This is about getting the website up and running.

We were stuck with the crappy design that Hand Crafted Webs had left us with (they took our existing store offline and never got one back up, only a blog), out a lot of money, and felt really stuck-in-the-mud. My lessons that I learned were:

• Don’t depend too much on a referral, still do a thorough background check and review of current and past work.
• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is (no matter how many times I’ve heard that, it took a real-life experience to fully “get it”).
• Be weary about working with foreign companies, where you’ll have little to no recourse if the deal goes sour.

So, how did we get our store up? My husband, and partner, did it himself. And once he was done with the store, he went back and re-designed the crappy blog-part and home page that we had been left with…we had heard from people that our site was difficult to navigate and it was difficult to shop. My husband finished a lot of the re-design this week and we’ve heard nothing but raves about how much better it is, how it’s now easy to shop, how it’s so much easier to tell what we do and who we are. So, I have to give my husband a zillion kudos for stepping up and taking on the task of learning HTML and PHP. He’s already amazing with graphics, but I’ve watched his graphic skills improve tenfold through the process as well.

Don’t get discouraged if it seems like it’s taking you forever to get your site up. I can tell you that if you are a designer or creative type, you’re likely to never be fully satisfied with the design. But your website should be a living document anyways, and so, keep in mind that you can keep making it better after you have it up and functioning.

Make sure you spec out the functions that you need currently and that you foresee in the future. Will you need the ability to offer wholesale prices and retail prices? Will you need the ability to shop by category, size, manufacturer, etc? how much design flexibility will you need? Will you need the ability to show multiple images for each product? Jot down every single thing you can think of that you want you website and users to be capable of, and then start researching designers and applications that will suit your needs.

In one of my upcoming posts I will talk about the value of a blog for an online boutique.

          

Entry Filed under: Online Boutique,The Startup Phase,The Tools You Need