The advances in mobile technologies and features of Google Maps Mobile have paved the way, and an iron clad reason, for retail jewelry stores to have mobile ready websites. Mobile ready websites are absolutely necessary to bring customers right to your front door.
But as an additional source of income you can sell products easily out your back door if you can find the right niche jewelry industry to target.
When it comes to shopping online people prefer to buy from stores that specialize. Our research indicates that when someone finds a knowledgeable vendor in their area of interest, they tend to come back again and again.
Obviously as a jewelry store you carry thousands of items from different jewelry categories in your store. But why not set up a website focusing on one particular category of jewelr... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
Throughout this entire lesson I mentioned several times that there are methods that should be avoided. The entire industry calls these bad methods "Black Hat SEO."
Even though this is a long lesson on vocabulary, I gave examples of several good jewelry SEO ideas. All these good methods are referred to as "White Hat SEO."
As long as you stick to White Hat search engine optimization techniques you should be able to quickly elevate your website to higher and higher ranking.
... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
For the absolute newcomer to the internet, the difference between a domain name, a web page and a website might not be clear, so let's explain it.
Your "Domain Name" is your chosen online name. The best option for your first domain name is something that includes your store name.
If your store name is "Nancy's Jewel Shop" then you should try to get the domain name nancysjewelshop.com instead of nancysjewelrystore.com
Your domain name should be chosen to match exactly how your customers refer to you. If at all possible, stay away from strange permutations like the one just explained.
When you hire a web programmer or designer, they will create an entire website according to your request. The "Website" is everything you have online, includin... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
Websites should no longer be designed to only appease your own personal likes and style. Large interactive websites should instead be designed with "human computer interaction" in mind.
You need to make sure the website design and layout is innately easy to understand with a high degree of friendliness. This type of design takes longer to implement, and requires the talents of website designers who have experience analyzing how and why visitors click on things.
This entire design method and the philosophy of worrying about how jewelry website visitors click is known as "Usability."
Even the more experienced usability expert could not design a perfectly accurate website for you on their first try. Every customer group, from every area of the United States or other parts of the world will respond differently... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
So far we've talked about different types of links, and the different vocabulary when referring to a link to your website vs. a link to someone else's website. And we talked about Reciprocal Linking, Link Bait and Authority Websites and how they all relate. We've covered a lot of ground in this lesson and there's still a lot more to go.
Let's think about Authority Websites again. An authority site is one which has shown a proficiency in a particular topic, and Goog... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
Remember what was said earlier, Content is King. The larger and more interesting your jewelry website is the better results you will have from search engines. But how exactly does that happen?
The natural method to develop better results over time is random unsolicited linking from other websites to yours. If that sounds confusing, just keep reading because I'm going to explain it right now.
Remember before when I mentioned Reciprocal Linking? You ask someone to put a link on their website in exchange for a link on yours. But an unsolicited link is much more valuable... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
Financial success comes when you achieve some renown in your area of expertise, and then figure out how to capitalize on it.
Your website will bring many customers and increased sales once it achieves expert or Authority status. So how do we do this? It's simple actually, just add 50 or more pages to your website relating to the topic you want to be an expert in.
Yep, 50 or more pages need to be added to your website.
Don't try to do this overnight, do it gradually over time, and when you reach 50 pages don't stop. Keep adding new pages to your website forever! Since you own a jewelry business it should be easy to find information to put on your website.
Here are some ideas for adding pages to your website: Your monthly newsletter Reviews of th... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
This is a common question asked of my design team over at JewelerWebsites.com. So here's the basic idea.
Top of the page (Header):
• Include a logo and or photo of your store. Make the logo/photo clickable back to your home page. • In the top right corner of the page you need to include links to the most common things your visitors will look for. Normally this is your Contact Us, Directions to Our Store, Store hours. Other things that might be popular are Store Events, Contest Registration, Register to Win, Daily On-line Specials. Also note that you can and should change this set of links to match your advertising. • With e-commerce sites you should also have a link to login to the customer account. • You could have a main navigation menu in your header, but only if those menu ... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
You can spend an exorbitant amount of money designing the perfect brochure to give to a customer. IBM once upon a time spent millions of dollars to create paper literature to sell their mainframe servers. Millions of dollars for a brochure that they new was only being given to 10 potential customers.
Please don't take the same approach with writing copy for your website. Don't get me wrong, you do need a well written website, but it does not have to be perfect. Every page of your website should be limited to 500 words or less. Actually 250 to 350 is probably a good measure, and you should try to have some copy on every page or your site.
Compose your copy for a high school junior or senior level education, not because your customers are uneducated, but because that level of reading can be fast and easily unders... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
As with all areas of business, you should assign specific tasks to the people with the appropriate skill set. You should have a designer work on "designing" your website and a programmer to "program" your website. These are two different types of people. The creative designer thinks with one side of their brain and the logical programmer thinks with the scientific side of their brain. Please be skeptical of anyone who says they are both a designer and a programmer as it is extremely infrequent to meet someone who was born with the gift of a balanced creativeness and logical thinking.
On the other hand, someone can learn to be creative after years of experience, and someone can learn how to be a programmer after years of working hard. A programmer can learn to design, but it's akin to painting by numbers. A designer can l... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
The most challenging aspect of building a website for a jewelry store would be the design. I have seen many people waste their time trying to figure out the best design for their website. Months of wasted time. Technology and website usefulness changes with every season; yes every 3 months. If you start designing you website today with one concept in mind you will find yourself out of date if it takes more than 3 months to launch the site.
Don't get wrapped up in the design aspect. Ask your website designer to suggest pre-made templates that can we tweaked, or go online and search for "jewelry website templates" to find your own. Just pick one and move on. In 6 seasons you will need to change it anyway.
The second challenging aspect with creating a website is the technology you build your website with. Do not ... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
The design of a website is important in that you want to make sure it is customer friendly. A website owner will experience several stages of understanding, just like grades in school. First Grade would be the jewelry store owner who is setting up their first website. They want to design it themselves, usually modeling it after another website they have seen. Imagine a child in a store pointing to a a toy saying "I want that!" The child does not have a true understanding if the toy is good for them or not. The child wants something fun to play with whereas the parent wants to make sure it's fun and educational.
The jewelry business is a very visual business. Thoughts of fire and brilliance abound all the time. Jewelry store owners usually want to control what their website looks like, down to the location of that ver... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
"Good" is a relative term. Some people view "good" as visually pleasing but being nice looking can only get you so far in business. As internet users become more savvy there has been a shift from what we call "eye candy" to something more "functional." The iPhone has provided a general education to almost everyone who is at least the slightest bit technologically aware. This awareness is of the iPhone "App," as in the commercials that claim "yeah, we have an App for that." Combine this with users of online social networks are increasingly more familiar with online interactive websites.
Online customers are not impressed with websites that simply display information, or have flashy graphics. Direct online interaction is what users are craving. Give your website users some way to directly interact with you and they will be... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
There are many website template companies out there today. Many of the templates actually come from only one or two main suppliers, but there are hundreds of resellers.
What you'll find there is a collection of thousands of templates that you can buy for about $62. Those templates are available for anyone to purchase when they are venturing out on their own to create a website without help from a design or programming firm.
But they are only templates, in that you have PhotoShop files and HTML pages available in the template. But there is still a lot of work to create a website.
You would need to know web programming and how to use Dreamweaver, and you need to know... VIEW FULL ARTICLE
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
