We were recently asked to look at a website of a furniture store. The site was very attractive, but it wasn’t generating any interest for the owner. We took a look at it and found a few things that concerned us.
The site looked like a site for a traditional furniture store. The problem became that they were an appointment only furniture store and they were not listing any of their prices. They’ve now made it very difficult for anybody to do business with them. A visitor can’t see the prices, and they can’t just drop by to see the furniture. They have to take the time to schedule an appointment. They’ve just broken the #1 rule of web development.
To compound things, the site emphasized services unrelated to furniture. Now, not only do we have a business that is difficult to engage with, now we’re not really sure what it is they really do.
Our recommendations for this business were:
- Create separate websites for the other services. It doesn’t matter how many services they perform, they are confounding their visitors and the search engines. Keep a site to one topic, whatever they are saving on not building additional sites, they are loosing in visitor frustration and lost search engine ranking.
- They needed to review their business model. Not listing prices and being appointment only take them out of the realm of “normal” furniture store. If these items are unchangeable, they need to figure out what makes them special in a good way and tell their story that turns these oddities into a unique selling proposition.
If none of these issues are addressed, tragically this website will probably never generate income for the business owner.