Target reached!
The Royal Horticultural Society has said that our sector is in crisis due to the lac...
Desperately Needed New Website!
Walsall, England, United Kingdom
Aim
The project aim is to enable us to fund the upgrade of our ancient website, and in turn allow us to serve our customers better!
Hello and thank you for visiting our project page,
Before we get into this, please feel free to share the link to this page with anyone who you think may wish to help us. Use email, facebook, twitter, whatever! And thank you in advance :)
Please read on below and after that, take a look at the donation rewards over on the right side of this page...
In 2016 I took on Cranesbill Nursery from its previous owner who wanted to retire. I am the third owner of the business. The original owner ran the nursery as a very small 'garden gate' business, literally from her garden for over 20 years until she wanted to retire. The second owner previous to me took the nursery on and ran it from his garden for 4 years until he reached retirement age! So although the business is 38 years old, it is still very small!
Cranesbill is now currently run predominately by myself, and part time helpers Jenny and, more recently Jon, who has joined us temporarily after being made redundant due to Covid-19.
When I took on the nursery in 2016, I had a real struggle to find somewhere to relocate the nursery to, but eventually found a small plot to rent on a private farm not far from where I live (pictured above). We could do with a bit more space now, but the one thing we are completely and utterly desperate for, is a new website...
The site is holding the business back, as it is not allowing us to generate the turnover needed to be able to improve it. It is totally inadequate and does not allow us to serve our customers in the best way possible. Three glaring examples of this are:
1. The website has no stock management system, which causes a huge amount of customer disappointment when plants are ordered from the site which may have sold out a while ago. I have to guess when plants may have sold out! Not the best way of doing business. And on top of this, when a plant sells out, I have to delete it from the site altogether, rather than being able to list it as 'sold out'. This wastes a lot of my time, which could be better spent answering customer queries or looking after plants!
2. We cannot list anything other than a Geranium on it. This is extremely limiting for us and extends our 'closed season' when we could be offering other products of interest to customers. We obviously want to retain the specialist aspect of the nursery, but we also want to grow the nursery, and in order to do that, we need to diversify a bit!
3. We cannot communicate effectively with our customers via our website. Important information on the site is often missed by customers due to the layout. It has limited ways of displaying product information, no delivery information section, no FAQ section, no box at the checkout for customers to include delivery instructions, no prominent way of communicating updates. The list goes on...
The site (pictured above) is currently looked after by a nice chappie in Canada, called Pete. Pete used to work for the company that originally created the site back in 2012. That company was dissolved and Pete took on the hosting of it. He has done a few minor improvements to the site for me over the last four and a half years, but when I sent him a long list of improvements I wanted making to the site he told me that the current site is written in such an old framework, it wouldn't be worth improving it. The site needs re-writing in a modern framework which will be fit for years to come and allow us to grow as a business.
The problem is that Pete has a day job as well as hosting our site, and although he has made attempts to tackle a re-write for us, he lacks the time and also some health problems have prevented him from really getting going with it. So the decision has been taken to transfer the site to a new agency. After searching around the interwebs, contacting various companies and achieving quotes, I have chosen a splendid agency to do the work, mainly based on the fact that they have created websites for other horticultural nurseries.
The website needs to be both re-designed and the underlying code re-written. We could easily go for an off the shelf site, using something like shopify or wordpress, but the issue with such platforms is that you have to use templates and a generalised system that firstly makes you end up looking like a lot of other businesses, and secondly doesn't necessarily fit the specific needs of the business.
Therefore, a custom built, bespoke e-commerce website is what is required. It is the 'shop window' for the business, and for a purely online business like us, it is a huge part of the customer experience. It should be informative, inspiring and easy to use. We are not a general store selling bits and bobs of this and that, we are specialists in what we offer, and that needs to be conveyed through our website.
If you are able to help us, we thank you immensely. And as an incentive, we'd like to offer anyone who does help us, either a discount off your next order (once the site is completed, as we'll be able to add discount codes then!) or a small free token of appreciation. We'll keep a database of those who have donated, so that we can keep track of discounts offered and used.
Anything we raise above the main target will go towards enabling us to employ our young helper, Jon, on a permanent basis and also helping us to move the nursery to a more suitable site whereby we can also grow 'on the ground'! Further information on our secondary target will be available in a separate section if/when the main target is reached.
How your money will be spent...
If we are able to achieve the main target, part of this will be spent on the migration of the website from Pete over to the new agency (circa £500). A second part of it will be spent on the consultation process, which is more our end, putting together a brief of what we want the site to do. This has to be extremely detailed including where everything should be placed on every individual page of the site and communicating this to the designers at the agency, (circa £1,200). And then the bulk of the money raised will be spent on the actual re-design and re-writing of the site, based on the quote we've received (£7,800).
Please also note that this is an 'all or nothing' project, which means that if our total is not met, we receive no money and you will not be charged, so we really need you to get behind us to help us meet that target.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through this. Please remember to share and spread the word. We need all the support we can get.
Best wishes and happy gardening, Gary.
This project successfully funded on 27th September 2020