|
Nov
22
|
On November 1st, a Las Vegas business, All About You Bridal Galleria sent a personal, 4-page letter to all its customers and contacts, announcing the closing of their business, at the end of the month.
The good news is the asuring message to their existing customers, who are still waiting on dresses. Instructions were given on how those orders were going to be fulfilled. They made it abundantly clear that they were not simply ‘closing their doors’ and stranding brides. They would follow through on all orders. Unfortunately, reports of these sort of closures crop up, in good times and bad. Usually, they are not handled in such a professional way.
AAYBG was a bridal salon selling dresses, accessories, and providing wedding planning services.
The letter outlined a number of reasons for closing, including:
- the economy
- ‘appalling’ online competition
- long time employees ‘running off and getting married, and having babies’
- compatibility of the business with the ownership’s personal lives
Through all this sentimentality, there is a major omission. From a website standpoint, this small business couldn’t market its way out of paper bag.
Harsh? You’re damn right!!
I see and critique a lot of websites. I use both my experience and technical tools to analyze sites. It’s hard to do worse than this.
One excellent free tools to evaluate Search Engine Optimization is called Website Grader. The provider of this tool offers many paid services, but this one is free. Just put in your company domain name (and those of a couple of competitors, if you’d like), and its evaluation system rockets into action. In about 30 seconds, you have been given a grade, on a 1 to 100 scale, with specific explanations of what you are doing well, and what needs correction, as it relates to Search Engine Optimization.
I’ve concluded, after running these evaluations via Website Grader on many sites, including my own, that if you make the recommended changes, you see immediate improvement in your score.
For the sake of comparison, I think a score of 70-79 is good. 80-84 is very good. 85-89 is excellent. 90 or more is outstanding.
After running the All About You Bridal Galleria website address through Website Grader system, it came up with a score of 2. That’s not a typo. It’s two, 2 TWO!!!
It would be hard to score that low, if one was trying. Just visit the final score, and see what the report says.
Besides what the report outlines, there are other major league flaws.
Here’s just one: Not only does the site play music, automatically. It plays LOUD music. Even if you mute it, when you navigate to another screen, the music BLASTS you again. You can’t hide from the music unless you entirely mute your computer. It is common knowledge that brides often do some of their wedding research from work (under the radar). And, therefore, the idea of putting auto-loading music, particularly loud music, is NEVER recommended for a wedding site. You will lose many prospective customers, immediately, because you have busted them to everyone within earshot of their computer.
I’m sure the AAYBG owners are wonderful people. It’s clear that their ethics and heart are in the right place. I wish them the best in serving their customers, and making their closing their doors in the smooth and orderly way they’ve planned.
There are many lessons one can learn here. Pick a couple.
Here’s mine: “We’re all ignorant, just in different things.” If you’re a 4-star chef, that doesn’t mean you’re qualified to run a restaurant. You must complement your weaknesses with a partner who has the appropriate strengths and/or seek outside professional advice.
Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Blog
One Ping to “Speaking ill of the dead: All About You Bridal Galleria closes its doors”
3 Responses to “Speaking ill of the dead: All About You Bridal Galleria closes its doors”
-
1. Jolyn Says:
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:12 pmI LOVE the website grader reports – it was easy to get my website scores up from 30 to over 70…any many of my collegues found it didn’t take much to get over 40 points…it’s the least anyone can do to take simple steps at improving their website.
-
2. Laurie Morgan Says:
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:55 pmInteresting post. I like Website Grader, too. One caveat I would offer, though – a site can have a high grade without being well-designed to sell visitors. The grade primarily indicates how well the site does in maximizing search engine friendliness. That’s great for getting traffic to come to the site, but doesn’t tell you much about how they react when they get there … and, it sounds like AAY would have a very hard time keeping brides engaged even if they improved their search engine friendliness! It’s really important for wedding vendors to start understanding traffic patterns on their site, developing ways to gather contacts, learn the sources of their traffic, etc.
For vendors whose hosts don’t provide good analysis tools, l like a free tool called Web Log Expert (http://www.weblogexpert.com). The “lite” version is free!
-
3. Mary Says:
January 17th, 2009 at 11:26 pmThe AAYBG in-store customer service was also about a two. The owners aren’t nice, they are actually very rude along with some of their staff members. It would just be morally wrong to close without giving the brides their dresses.
November 24th, 2008 at 9:21 am
[...] Speaking ill of the dead: All About You Bridal Galleria closes its doors [...]