Bike shop website - doing it right

Cianos

Hi folks,
Hope to get some advice here. I'm looking to get a website built for a new bike shop. I want the website to look smart, professional and modern, with a distinctive look and feel as regards branding.

I want it to work for me as well in terms of good google rankings and be flexible enough to expand upon if required. ie I don't want a site that looks great but then once it's done it's hard to do much else with it.

Essentially the site should serve the purpose of showcasing the products (a small range of specialised bikes and accessories), answer any questions the customer has, and give them confidence to either purchase online or make the trip to the shop itself in order to buy one of our specialised bikes.

In order to achieve this, what kind of requirements should I be asking for in a web designer? And if there are any other tips you may have I'd really appreciate the help

Thanks v.much

Ronan007

Hi,

This is very good idea... selling bike accessories through this will be even more good. It should be a good looking professional website. watch for professional designers who have experience in making unique solutuons..

I was looking in google for getting some bike info, couldn't find any good one.. please send me if you have found any good websites..


Thanks
Ronan

cormee

Cianos wrote: »

Hi folks,
Hope to get some advice here. I'm looking to get a website built for a new bike shop. I want the website to look smart, professional and modern, with a distinctive look and feel as regards branding.

I want it to work for me as well in terms of good google rankings and be flexible enough to expand upon if required. ie I don't want a site that looks great but then once it's done it's hard to do much else with it.

Essentially the site should serve the purpose of showcasing the products (a small range of specialised bikes and accessories), answer any questions the customer has, and give them confidence to either purchase online or make the trip to the shop itself in order to buy one of our specialised bikes.

In order to achieve this, what kind of requirements should I be asking for in a web designer? And if there are any other tips you may have I'd really appreciate the help

Thanks v.much

Do a search for an ecommerce/shopping cart script that suits your needs ( http://www.hotscripts.com/category/php/scripts-programs/e-commerce/shopping-carts/ is a good starting point), look for one that ticks all your boxes and has SEO built in. Depending on your needs you may have to pay up to a few hundred Euros for a good one but it's worth the investment as it will be your biggest cost (after your designer). Look for a script that uses templates that are easy to edit (if you've chosen a designer before you purchase the script involve him/her in the decision). Choosing your designer is easy - ask to see examples of their work, ideally they should have experience installing and editing scripts, and by the sounds of it they should be capable of translating your present brand into an online version, so branding experience would be a plus. Set payment milestones and spell out exactly what it is you are looking for and what you expect of the designer and if possible have the (written) content ready for them when they need it.

Pixelcraft

Cianos wrote: »

Hi folks,
Hope to get some advice here. I'm looking to get a website built for a new bike shop. I want the website to look smart, professional and modern, with a distinctive look and feel as regards branding.

I want it to work for me as well in terms of good google rankings and be flexible enough to expand upon if required. ie I don't want a site that looks great but then once it's done it's hard to do much else with it.

Hi Cianos, check out designers sites for a style you like, and check that they can code well. Although SEO is a separate industry, a well coded site will help with that somewhat.

Cianos wrote: »

Essentially the site should serve the purpose of showcasing the products (a small range of specialised bikes and accessories), answer any questions the customer has, and give them confidence to either purchase online or make the trip to the shop itself in order to buy one of our specialised bikes.

You'll need to decide on which payment processing you want to use. Merchant account with realex is probably the best option, paypal is the easiest to set up, so research what's best for you before approaching a designer.

Cianos wrote: »

In order to achieve this, what kind of requirements should I be asking for in a web designer? And if there are any other tips you may have I'd really appreciate the help

Thanks v.much

Every good designer will issue you with a brief to gather information on what you need, and what type of customers you have, have an initial meetign or two, they should then be able to design a site with your specific requirements in mind.

Of course this is all budget depending, so another route you could go down is by using a template that gets populated with your content. Obviously, this isn't nearly as effective, but it depends how important the online presence of your business will be.

Unlike Cormee, unless you've a lot of web experience I wouldn't recommend ploughing ahead and picking your scripts, and the tech you want to use, as you'll be eliminating some designers from working with you. Find a company or freelancer you trust and let them guide you - after all it's their core business. Best of luck!

cormee

Pixelcraft wrote: »

Unlike Cormee, unless you've a lot of web experience I wouldn't recommend ploughing ahead and picking your scripts, and the tech you want to use, as you'll be eliminating some designers from working with you. Find a company or freelancer you trust and let them guide you - after all it's their core business. Best of luck!

Well he's a business owner and seems to know the sort of functionality he wants from his site, so I'd assume he's capable of looking at working demos of scripts and forming an opinion on what would suit his needs and what wouldn't. No tech knowledge is needed for that.

Regarding eliminating designers - I'm only suggesting the designer edits the script templates, and regardless of the code behind the templates I'd hope any designer he'd take on would be capable of working with html... and I did mention involving the designer in the purchase of the script.

Pixelcraft

cormee wrote: »

Well he's a business owner and seems to know the sort of functionality he wants from his site, so I'd assume he's capable of looking at working demos of scripts and forming an opinion on what would suit his needs and what wouldn't. No tech knowledge is needed for that.

I disagree!

p

What type of budget do you have? To get something with really good SEO, custom visual design and support you're talking between 4-10k. There's some good companies listed here, you could contact a few of them.
http://sortfolio.com/ireland


You may find some people who'll just take an script and install it on a server and just customise it. This will be cheaper, but you'll suffer on quality, and it's tough to avoid chancers in this price range. Could be a good starting point though.


If you're budget is a lot lower, then you could experiment with something like shopify.com or similar services which offer a 'prepackaged' ecommerce system. They'll take a big cut but it could be a cheap way to get your toe in the water.

cormee

Pixelcraft wrote: »

I disagree!

Ok. So you think someone needs technical knowledge to use a shopping cart? I'm only suggesting a bit of window shopping, looking at existing ecommerce systems, testing their functionality, drawing up a short-liist etc.

I'm pretty sure that as he managed to post the question he's capable of that much.

Pixelcraft

cormee wrote: »

Ok. So you think someone needs technical knowledge to use a shopping cart?

No, where did I say that? you suggest he picked which cart to use, entirely different to using one. Anyway this is OT and unhelpful.

Cianos

Thanks for the replies. My budget is low, but my requirements are not too complex either. We are only starting with a few products, so I'll just need a site to catalogue these and present them nicely. Then the usual FAQ/Contact etc pages. Basically, feature wise I can't imagine it being far off from sites that most designers probably have a lot of experience building, so I just want somebody who will add a few nice flourishes here and there and tie it all together nicely. And of course priming it for good SEO and additional content/features later on when there's the need.

Regarding the ecommerce side of things, I'm not entirely sure what our requirements will be in the early days. But at some stage we want the ability to take orders for a bike, for example, and then we ship the bike to the customer. Is this something that you could do with a paypal account? I would have thought paypal seems a bit amateurish for this kind of selling?

I checked shopify.com and they charge upwards of $24/month with a 2% transaction fee. Whereas realex charge €29/month and don't seem to charge commission at all.

Options and pricing would determine whether we implement these features early or later on. But I think it'd make good business sense for us to do it sooner rather than later, so any further advice on how best to do this would be great.

3DataModem

I have to say I really like the simplicity of the mcconvey cycles website. Easy to search for products.

Add a "compatible with" section for each product and you're in business.

p

Cianos wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. My budget is low, but my requirements are not too complex either. We are only starting with a few products, so I'll just need a site to catalogue these and present them nicely. Then the usual FAQ/Contact etc pages. Basically, feature wise I can't imagine it being far off from sites that most designers probably have a lot of experience building, so I just want somebody who will add a few nice flourishes here and there and tie it all together nicely. And of course priming it for good SEO and additional content/features later on when there's the need.

I'd say you should try get a company who will take an off-the-shelf e-commerce product like Magento or OSCommerce and customise it for you. Unfortunately, I think all those 'little things' you mention will cost money because they take time to do right, but start simple and use an existing design template and see how you get on.

Let us know what you decide to do and when it launches

Good luck!

cormee

Pixelcraft wrote: »

No, where did I say that? you suggest he picked which cart to use, entirely different to using one. Anyway this is OT and unhelpful.

Yes, in my first post it does read like I advised him to purchase a script without consulting a designer/developer - sorry, bad wording.

Disregard that, it would be a bad idea.

I'd still advise you (OP) to start familiarising with the different e-commerce scripts available, even if your designer advises you against your favoured script it will still give him a good idea of the functionality you are looking for.

tomED

Cianos wrote: »

Regarding the ecommerce side of things, I'm not entirely sure what our requirements will be in the early days. But at some stage we want the ability to take orders for a bike, for example, and then we ship the bike to the customer. Is this something that you could do with a paypal account? I would have thought paypal seems a bit amateurish for this kind of selling?

I checked shopify.com and they charge upwards of $24/month with a 2% transaction fee. Whereas realex charge €29/month and don't seem to charge commission at all.

Paypal is ok to get started with - but you should be quickly thinking of moving to another system. Realex don't charge a %, but you will be charged a % from your merchant account.

You could try Feepay.ie, they're pay as you - tell them I sent you!