In December, I offered a Business Website Design Package for a silent auction that benefited two organizations that help with organ donations. I am proud to announce that the winner of that package is imakewine.com. imakewine.com sales wine making kits, equipment and supplies. Their website was receiving low traffic and had some issues with the way the website worked. They are using Homestead to run their web store.

After looking over their current website, I saw several opportunities for improvement. The first thing I notice was their homepage only had an image and a button that said “Enter Site”. There was no description of what was being sold on their website. This was hurting them in two ways, people coming to their website had to click on the Enter Site button to find out and when a search engine web crawler visited the website, the search engine web crawler could not find anything information about this website. Having no content on their homepage was not helping attract new customers. I added some text to the homepage and optimized that text with certain keywords for the search engines.

Another issue with the website had to do with their FAQ page. They had a list of questions and answers, but a person had to search the entire page to see if the question they had was listed on this page. I set up the page so a visitor could look at the top of the page to see if a question they had was on this page. If they find a question they had, they can now click on it to get down to the answer. This allows the visitor to find the information they are looking for easier, making a happier visitor.

Working with web stores can be tricky to optimize for both visitors and search engines. Most of these companies that offer web stores hosting and management systems claim to be very easy to set up and showcase website they host that are very successful. The truth is there is no silver bullet in the web store field. It takes hard work and you may even need to hire a website design/developer professional to help you with optimizing one of these website. If you are an owner of a web store and need some help with getting better results from your web store, feel free to contact me about helping optimize your web store.