Name of your website?Quality Gemstones
Your name?
Trudy Mackenzie
Your Location (city, etc)
Sapphire
When did you start your website and why?
I built this website two weeks ago, I already have a website that sells gemstone rough(uncut) but wanted somewhere to list the higher quality cut gemstones and gemstone rings.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
I really did above, but we have expanded our gemstone range so much, that having gemstones selling for $50 and $15000 on the same website wasn't working, this new website has already had two good sales, so it was worth the effort of building the site.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
The most differicult part of creating the website is all the SEO work that must be done in order to get the website ranking well in search engines.
What has been the easist part of operating your website?
Making the site itself, since it's run by database, we just took a copy of the old site, removed all the cheaper gems, changed the look of the site, and the site was there. All up, the site took only about 24 hours to create. Full created to our webdesigners, I just mentioned it, and the next day it was done.
What was your biggest mistake?
Grouping out jewellery into price ranges, people like to choose what they want, and not think about the price.
Who maintains your website and why?
Our webdesigners CanzDesign will do things like making new webpages, and changes to the actual look to the website, simply because they know what they are doing, and they do a wonderful job, we'll update the gems and jewellery for sale, adding new products and making sure the site is up-to-date, Canz made sure we could do that easily.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
Oh, there isn't enough room here to say how our websites have benefited our business, but generally we live near a very small mining town, and their's no way we could reach our clients that come from all over the world, at least half of our sales are to Americans, the only other way to sell to them is through ebay, but people buying on ebay only want cheap stuff, not the quality gems we sell.
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
For people like us, that live out the back of beyond e-commerse websites are the only way we could reach our clients, even the ones that live in Australia. Sure we could go to the Sydney Markets, but the expense of going there, and the limited market we would still have, when you think the website costs $10 a month for hosting, and it open 24/7 you just can't beat it.
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Lynny from Canz Design does our SEO for us, I helped at the start with looking for link exchanges, but what she did worked much better,on our first website before meeting Lynny we'd get about 150-300 visitors a month, and had no sales at all, last month we had over 7500 unique visitors, and plenty of sales.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
Oh, Search Engines have definately helped our website, we'd still only be making a little money at the local markets unless the search engines weren't listing our website so well.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
The SEO lynny did did has been the most effective for promoting our website. She even let's us use her email address to post to places like this so we don't have to worry about spam.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
Advertising in our local paper
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
Nothing, I'm quite happy the way the internet works for me, perhaps yes definately less spam would be good.
Where will this be posted?
I don't know, but I am going to find out, and see if I can find anything else to comment on, or at least read what other people have posted.
What is your website address?
Quality Gemstones
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