Building An Effective Garden Shed Website

As more and more people are using the internet to search for products and services and the garden shed business is no different. Having a website can help you attract new customers in your local area but there is no point in having a website to advertise your garden shed business if it does not deliver and that is why it is important to consider the following aspects when designing your website.



Site Structure

You should organise your products by category to make it easier for your users to browse your products - if you sell a range of outdoor garden buildings you may wish to categorise by:

• Garden sheds



• Summer houses



• Other timber products

It is best to have a specific page for each building, and it would be wise to have professionally taken photographs of each building and create a small gallery for each building. Lightbox2 is a good gallery tool to use, not only is it user friendly but it uses JavaScript and not flash to generate it's appearance which is beneficial as more and more people are using Apple devices such as the iPad iPod and iPhone to surf the net which do not support Adonis flash player.



Despite having a small gallery of images for each garden shed some customers may want to come and view some of your buildings so if you have a display range at your workshop then you may wish to integrate a google map on your website to show the location of your workshop.



Have An Effective Homepage



Having a good homepage is very important in order to make a good first impression with your customer. You can use your homepage effectively by providing "teasers" of the various sections on your website (I.e. Product categories, delivery information, quick contact info). Remember when a user first comes to your site they are not going to stick around too long unless you make the right first impression - so get straight to the point and let them know exactly why you are the right comps my for them to use.



Converting Users To Customers

Having a contact form embedded on each of the building pages will provide the user with a handy, user friendly means of submitting an enquiry. Having a quick and easy contact form is likely to encourage users to submit their enquiry rather than having to click around the site visiting other pages before they are offered the chance to fill out a contact form.



Use calls to action such as "call us today" "order now" or "get in touch today" to help encourage the user to get in touch using the site. Having an easy to use contact form and having an easy-to-find contact number will help prevent customers from leaving your site and continuing their search elsewhere.



Have Useful Site Content

It is also important to provide users with as much information about your buildings as possible. Users may be keen to see information such as price, dimensions, door position options and a brief description about each building.



If you are a local business you may wish to specify your delivery radius so customers are aware of how far you are willing to deliver. You may also wish to provide other key information such as opening times, contact number/email address etc.



Optimising For Search Engines



Once your website is live you may want to validate the XHTML and CSS to make sure it is cross-browser compatible you can do this by visiting http://validator.w3.org/ and entering your web URL.



To be found by Internet-users looking to buy garden sheds you will need to appear high in search engines such as Google Yahoo and Bing. To do this you must optimise your site using both on and off-page techniques. On-page techniques include having unique titles on each page, using heading tags appropriately and having keyword-rich internal links. Off-page work involves building backlinks from other sites to show search engines that you are a trusted site and will therefore rank you higher.



If you are getting lots of visitors to your site and your site seems to be generating lots of income you may want to consider expanding your website by implementing ecommerce software to allow customers to purchase your products online. My website for Cheshire Sheds is a good example of an effective garden shed website.