I recently completed this project for my parents. They have been operating this retail health food store in Bourbon, Missouri since 1995 and up until about a month ago have been suffering with an ugly baby website that was struggling to produce sales and a professional web presence. Now they usually say doing business with family is a bad idea, but this was one of the smoothest projects I have undertaken. Understanding their vision came easily and since they are my parents understanding how to build something to represent their business goals and vision surprisingly came quite naturally. We chose the Yahoo Merchant Solutions / Store platform for its known reliability and my familiarity with the features. They decided to keep things simple for a start but are in a position to easily expand and change plans to offer more features when needed. I am writing this post to highlight some of the features and show case my first full ecommerce addition to the portfolio.
1.) The Store :
This is my first RTML creation, I have done minor modifications in the past and extensively modified the CSS of the yahoo store templates but this project required a bit more to accomplish the vision for the site and product presentation.
I didn’t go too overboard with the rtml programming , I did add several features but the whole purpose of this rtml modification was to provide a template where they can manage it without having to muddle through code to make updates { the beauty of a yahoo store }
RTML Features :
Lightbox for images – courtesy of a tut through e-commsolution.com
This may not be a necessary feature but from a presentation perspective I am a fan and it adds a more custom feel to the default templates
Video box for Youtube videos – I used essentially the same tut as lightbox with a few hacks and the mootools library. This also was in no way needed for the site but I am a fan of having video display for product info in a non intrusive way.
Spry Tabbed Panels – this is a common dreamweaver script that is fairly simple to implement but this was a bit tougher than the above features to add. This was well worth the effort from an SEO perspective as they now have designated fields on each page to include a primary item description, supplement facts { a requirement for liability reasons }, and product reviews to assist in shopper decision making and influence conversion.
I also had to do some minor hacking on the default template to manipulate some of the layout for section pages and the top navigation to create an actual contact page as opposed to a mail to link which is the default behavior.
Graphic Work :
I created a custom add to cart button to draw the eye and attempt to increase conversion, many Yahoo store developers have advised this as a best practice and using Fireworks made this task simple and fairly easy. Don’t worry I plan to write a tut on this soon and hopefully will have some button sets available as a freebie in the near future.
I aslo created a Graphic Header for the store, blog an paypal page. Having this implemented accross all pages was crucial to maintain a consistent look and feel through the entire site and hopefully encourage trust and conversion.
The cart was a bit tricky to manipulate at first but with a bit of css knowledge I was able to accomplish the look I was attempting with out generating a complete CSS file as a custom upload. This was accomplished with a few inline edits. I also intentionally emphasized the contact information in the header to handle any last minute questions and lower cart abandonment if at all possible. Also as part of my previous post I customized the Paypal checkout page to try and maintain the consistent look as much as possible.
On top of design and SEO optimal product catalog set up with “friendly urls ” and required google shopping fields we have also implemented the Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo site verification, and Google analytics for close monitoring of site crawl-ability and valuable traffic data.
Another key aspect of this project was to promote them through more modern mediums like social media. They had previously taken my suggestion to start posting in a wordpress blog regularly to build a reputation of authority in their field but we took it a step further with this project.
On top of styling the blog to match the store to promote consistency I have added full status update functionality so everytime they write a post it is syndicated through their social media networks.
This is planned to be a huge part of their entire site as education of their consumers is one of their biggest goals. They for approximately 5 years have been writing articles to their local newspapers to educate their community on health topics which they still very actively still do but now with full digital publication they can extend their reach far beyond their local area { now I just have to show them the power of hyperlinking lol }. Along with this new blog I also set them up with a Facebook business page so they can more officially promote their store and items , I also set them up with a twitter account which I will probably end up managing in the long term. Over all I feel this was a very success full project and given the prior site which I hope to add screen shots for soon.
Stop by the site htt://www.cdrnaturals.com check it out and let them know what you think, and BUY some vitamins or supplements to take care of yourself….Cheers… To your health!!
