October 08, 2015

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 7

Yesterday: Sit down and look over your website critically. What needs work? What needs to be freshened up? What have you been putting off? Get to work, create an action plan!

Before we get started, why not take a look at our online shop to see what we're talking about!
This was not a difficult task to undertake, but for some reason it's been the hardest blog post to write so far. Maybe it's because it's our seventh day in a row, maybe it's because it's been a particularly long and exhausting day, or maybe there's no good reason at all. Whatever the cause, we might as well start at the beginning.

We approached this exercise from two different directions. First, we sat down and wrote down all the things we've been talking about over the past few weeks. We discussed what we thought was working well and what wasn't. We tried to approach the matter the way we would approach a studio critique in art school, to look at our site as though we were complete strangers. We were honest and forthright and we tried not to go too deeply into any one point.

L-R: our discussion list and the Etsy worksheet, our Etsy shop's front page, working on our shop critique
Our second approach was to try critiquing our shop using the Shop Critique Worksheet that Etsy sent out to all of it's sellers who had signed up for their holiday season email seller's seminar. When we were first starting out, we signed up for community critiques rather frequently in order to get feedback on how we were setting things up. We had mixed results with this line of attack. It was very helpful in that it sent us off in search of very specific information and asked us to look at that information in a different light than we had previously. However, it's scope was rather limited and didn't really help us come up with an action plan.
Some of the listings in our Etsy shop. We need to change our background, the wood just doesn't photograph well.
With the information we gathered from our discussion and the results of the critique worksheet, we then sat down and came up with our action plan. We now have a much more specific list of tasks we'd like to accomplish and a number of items to research further. Chief among those is to reshoot all of our items since we're not entirely enthusiastic about the background we used as well as updating our shipping profiles and finally utilizing the new shipping tools that Etsy made available in the spring. We also need to go back and research shopping cart websites again as well as finally secure our url!

Some of our Greetings from... cards.
In the meantime, we've updated the look of our shop to fall into line with the update we made to our social media accounts earlier this week. It's nice to have everything all fresh and tidy!

Today: Delete apps from your phone or tablet that you don’t use. Organize the apps you do use in order to optimize your device’s layout.

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