Make a good first impression

If a website is the face of your garden center online, then an outdated page can reflect poorly on your business. Often, potential customers’ first experiences with your store is via the Internet. Extending a customer’s buying power to the digital space means refreshing your website at least once every few years, according to store owners and industry experts interviewed by Garden Center magazine.

Web-wise, mobile-enabled consumers are more likely to follow through on a purchase or visit if they’re able to gather thorough, trustworthy information on a product or service. Visiting a website lacking these qualities can be like walking into a rundown store in the real world, says Diane Blazek, executive director of All-America Selections and the National Garden Bureau, a separate pair of nonprofit organizations that serve as informational and marketing arms for the horticulture industry.

“Part of it is perception,” Blazek says. “If you have a website that looks old, people will think your information is old and irrelevant.”

Easier navigation is key

Blazek is overseeing a restructure of both the AAS and NGB websites, with a dual launch planned for the end of 2016. The organizations, now comparing quotes from a handful of web design companies, will likely start work on the revamp by spring.

Once complete, the sites will be easier to navigate and allow users better access to popular pages, Blazek says. For example, the National Garden Bureau’s “New Varieties” page may feature a slideshow of ornamentals or flower types a visitor can sift through via a variety of new navigation options.

“We have to figure out the hierarchy first when we do the redesign,” Blazek says. “The most popular page will have the largest image on the home page. From there you can scroll down and see other pages in order of their popularity.”

The website restructure has been an education for the organization chief and her marketing director. As each group has a long list of retailers, brokers and consumers it communicates with, there was some early discussion about building a CRM (customer relationship management) database to help handle those interactions.

“The firms we talked to said that would be too expensive; we don’t need something so robust for a small organization,” says Blazek. “We were thankful to them for saying that.”

Any web design firm should have a business’s overall strategic plan in mind when remaking its website. “Get a firm that will focus on your goals,” Blazek says. “Otherwise, you may be six months down the road (with a new site) when you say, ‘This isn’t where we’re going with the company.’”

Reaching customers on the go

Fairview Garden Center, which grows and sells herbs, vegetables, trees and annuals on a 6-acre plot in Raleigh, N.C., used analytics to determine the importance of mobile optimization for its new site unveiled in March.

Consumers on the go are potential big business, says Heather Rollins, the store’s marketing director. Earlier this year, Google reported that more search queries take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan.

“The site has to be as user friendly on a smartphone as it would be on a desktop computer,” says Rollins, whose family-owned garden center employs 10 full-time workers and garners $3 million in annual revenue.

The business began refurbishing its digital home in December 2014. After the web development firm they were collaborating with was bought out, they found another company to assist them with design and search engine functionality. Creation of the site cost between $9,000 and $10,000, with those funds taken from the radio and direct mail marketing budget.

The revamped website highlights the garden center’s homegrown history, which covers 40 years and three generations of providing plants for the Raleigh area. To that end, the new home page tells the tale of founders Tom and Jo Ann Dewar, who purchased 18 acres of farmland that would later become the bustling retail garden business.

“We wanted our story out there,” Rollins says. “It sets us apart from box stores and other garden stores.”

As reaching prospective customers was another focus of the redesign, the garden center had to determine how inexperienced gardeners search for plants online. Key words like “annual” or “perennial” may not be in that person’s vocabulary, but typing “purple flower in Raleigh” into a search bar puts Fairview Garden Center’s website among the first pages of Google results.

Staying relevant requires updating content regularly, Rollins says. Website blogs are updated twice monthly, while a newsletter reaches consumers directly.

“It keeps us fresh in the customer’s mind,” she says. “They know they can go to our site and learn how to garden.”

New info is good info

Grant Line Nursery & Garden Center overhauled its website in summer 2014, replacing a three-year-old site that offered little more than some general information about the New Albany, Ind., enterprise.

“We needed something that was attractive and represented us better,” says Damian Stumler, president and owner of the plant retailer, which grows annuals at its 6-acre location and offers landscape design, build and maintenance services.

Grant Line’s remade online space has a much improved flow, says Stumler, allowing for easier click-throughs via drop-down menus, tabs and links to social media pages.

“If you have old information, it looks like you don’t update your plants,” says Stumler, now employing a dozen wintertime workers at the business. “If your website is behind, then your store is behind.”

An independent contractor built the new site, with the budget for the project coming directly from sales. “Anything was better than what we had,” Stumler says. “The site was created to provide a good visual aid. We’re not trying to sell services, but we want people to know about those services.”

Ultimately, fixing up your garden center’s website doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated, but it should be well thought-out, Blazek says.

“There’s a fear of tech speak initially, but you learn so much going through the process.”

Douglas is a Cleveland Heights-based freelance writer and journalist. In addition to Garden Center, his work has been published by Midwest Energy News, Crain’s Cleveland Business and Fresh Water Cleveland.