For 6 years back in high school and my early couple summers of undergrad, I worked at a privately owned teacher supply store in Calvert County, MD called Educate & Celebrate, Inc. The store was known throughout the county for it’s stock of teacher supplies, bulletin board decorations, workbooks, flashcards, etc, as well as it’s wide variety of puzzles, wooden toys, educational games and toys and variety of office supplies. Students could come for their summer reading books, school supplies, locker gear, and more. While I worked at this store, I not only learned how to be a professional working as a sales clerk at the counter, I also was given experience in filling online and phone orders, working with advertising co-op as well as helping my boss with reorganizing the website so that it was easier to work with for our customers.
The website had previously been hard to find because of lack of key words on the page, and was not easy to navigate because of hard to read links and outdated graphics. Now the website for the store is easier to use because it’s organized, has a menu to different types of products and is visually pleasing for customers when they go to the site. You can even pull up the calendar now from the main screen and see what deals or special events are going on.
After we reorganized the website, we sent out mailers to everyone on our list, and although that helped our online sales, the sales jumped even more from long distance shoppers that now came across our website more easily based on key words for search engine return results. It really is amazing what you can achieve by making sure your site is easy to navigate and easy to find.
