About a year ago, we were approached by a young lady inquiring about the steps she should take in preparing to launch an ecommerce web site designed to sell scented candles to consumers. It was truly a unique situation in that she had not made any progress toward developing the site. In fact, she hadn’t even secured a domain yet. This was an incredibly clean slate and an opportunity that I’ve rarely encountered in my years as an online marketing consultant.
After deciding on a domain, we suggested that she set up a hosting account with Media Temple and helped her set up a WordPress blog using Media Temple’s one-click install procedure. We enabled Askimet and threw in a few SEO and Social Media plugins and she was off and running. The reason we did this was to get the website indexed by the search engines and to show some signs of life while she was accumulating the working capital neccesary to execute the project. We advised her to obtain some nepotistic links and to get some links from free blog directories and the like. To be honest, she really didn’t blog all that much… nor did she need to. Blogging a couple of times per month was enough to get and keep the search engines coming back to the site.
Cutting to the chase… in the past 3 months we have been working on the design and development of the web site. There is still alot of work to be done as we will be adding more product lines to the site and there is still plenty of SEO work to be done, but we decided to launch the site anyway to synch with some of the offline marketing initiatives that CandleStyle has started to execute.
The site is programmed in PHP and built on the Magento Commerce platform. The design (both online and off) was created in house as were all of the product images (we’re particularly proud of these… way to go Joel!).
We came across a couple of great resources we came across as we were researching SEO modules for Magento. Magento SEO by Yoast (love that guy) and BlueAcorn put together a post building on Yoast’s more basic overview. We’ll put together a more detailed post in the future on all the modules we’ve tried and used, but the two links above are sufficient for starters.
In the weeks and months to come, we will be chronicling this project throughout each step as we implement more advanced SEO, Social Media and other online marketing strategies. Obviously, a special thanks to CandleStyle.com is in order for providing us with this unprecedented opportunity to provide our readers and those who share our passion for online marketing with an insiders look into the day-to-day happenings of a professional online marketing firm starting an ecommerce web project from scratch.
