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April 24, 2024⚓️ How to know when it's time to adjust your website We're teaching in Chicago next week – email me if we can meet up! Hi Reader, Sometimes I get a bit uptight about finishing and sending in my article for UPPERCASE. Once Janine publishes the magazine, there’s no way to edit or fix mistakes. An appealing thing about my line of work, web design, is that a website is never done. Why adjust your website? Aside from reactively fixing things on your site, you can also proactively adjust it. Why? As Janine pointed out to me, we ourselves are always…
April 18, 2024⚓️ Have you seen these fascinating small business stats? Hi Reader, I got curious about the number of small businesses that grow into established businesses, and I wanted to share what I found with you (I've included references in the bottom of this email). Did you know? 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses That's 33.3 million small businesses! These businesses employ almost half of the workforce: over 61.6 million people 43.4% of businesses are owned by women 20.4% of businesses are minority-owned The average small business owner…
April 10, 2024⚓️ Will you be doing Mother's Day marketing this year? Hi Reader, Mother's Day (Sunday, May 12) is a huge holiday for a lot of she shop owners we work with. Do you plan any marketing or products around this holiday? If so, now is the time to be planning your marketing campaigns. While many people are happy to join you in your Mother's Day celebrations, this can be an uncomfortable day for some people (or maybe just not important to them). If you want to offer people the option to opt-out of Mother's Day marketing, that is a nice thing to do. It…
April 3, 2024⚓️ How to maximize retail profit by mastering dead stock management Did you fix your email setup for Google by the deadline? Learn more Hi Reader, Katherine Raz, a retail expert in our community and the owner of Fernseed, is back to share her insights into inventory management. If you own a brick-and-mortar shop, you won't want to miss this – and quite a bit of this applies to online sales as well. Dead stock (products that aren't selling) is bad for business It might not seem that terrible—after all, isn’t it nice to have a big selection of products…
March 27, 2024⚓️ Here's what you can do with a Shopify blog Hi Reader, Often, when shop owners come to us for a custom website design, they are unsure about whether to include a blog directly on the Shopify platform, or to build it on another platform such as WordPress. For the great majority of websites, we recommend using the Shopify blogging platform. A Shopify blog is simpler than a WordPress blog, but most shop owners don’t need any bells and whistles. Managing two sites can be expensive and complicated, and promoting your products from a…
March 20, 2024⚓️ How we switched to a four day week Hi Reader, I went into business for myself in 2004. At first, it was just me on my laptop, sideways on the couch, working any and every hour. Then, in 2008, I was pregnant, and figured it would be hard to keep doing the whole business all by myself. I started hiring a team to replace me. At first, my group was a scrappy team of freelancers. Eventually, I hired enough people that I needed more structure. For some crazy reason, I copied the corporate template. I structured our workweek the way…
March 13, 2024⚓️ A shop owner's eye-opening realization Lots of events coming up! See where we're speaking next. Hi Reader, I'm super excited to share a recent project with you! It's a fantastic example of how, if your website isn't functioning well, or has been an afterthought, one of our quick theme customization projects can be an effective way to move forward. It gets your message across, is totally on-brand, and boosts sales, without the big investment of a fully custom site. We worked with Biff Ulm of Nice Enough stickers to design a Shopify…
March 6, 2024⚓️ Want to launch a retail store? Here are 3 big tips Hi Reader, Katherine Raz, a retail expert in our community and the owner of Fernseed, recently shared her insights with us about launching a new retail shop. If you’re considering a new retail venture, this is a must-read! Remember when we thought our kids would actually play with Haba wood toys? When we thought we’d use our maternity leave to make healthy smoothies and wash cloth diapers while the baby napped?You have no idea what parenting will be like until that baby arrives. Before that,…
February 28, 2024⚓️ How to keep your site safe from copycats Hi Reader, True story – last year, during an in-depth SEO audit, we discovered half a dozen fake websites that were copying Aeolidia. Yikes! These spurious sites had cloned our content; infringing on our copyrighted material and negatively impacting our organic traffic. It took a fair amount of stubbornness on our end, but happily, the spam sites have all been shut down. The rise of copycat and spam sites presents a growing concern. These security issues, if left unaddressed, can undermine a…
February 21, 2024⚓️ When website projects go wrong Hi Reader, I've gotten three emails so far this year from people who want our help fixing a not-quite-right website redesign. They either tried to save money with a budget website developer or by building out a site themselves. Now they want Aeolidia to get the site where it actually needs to be. Unless you've hired a true specialist, you may not know why your site isn't working as well as you'd like it to. There are so many tiny but important things that add up to a frictionless and…