Name of your website?Homemade Candle Creations
Your name?
Melissa Hall
Your Location (city, etc)
Albany
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We are a family run business specializing in homemade, hand poured soy candles. We make tealights, tarts, votives, chunk candles and other soy jar candles
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I've always wanted to have my own business. I've tried several different things, but nothing seemed to fit. I love to paint and started a website for that and even sold some paintings on ebay, but it is just too hard to sit down and paint when you have 2 young boys running around and another on the way. So I found out about soy candles and, since I love candles anyway, I decided to try making my own. Needless to say, I loved it, and found it was something I could do fairly easily with the kids underfoot, so I started my website advertising my candles.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Boy, I guess it's been probably almost 8 or 9 years ago now since I started my first free hosted website. It was for my artwork. At that time I only knew a little html and I basically just used a template for the design that came with the free web host. Since then I've obviously learned so much more and the websites I have now are my own design through a paid hosting company.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
You know, I don't exactly remember. I think Homemade Candle Creations just sort of popped into my head and I haven't found another candle company by that name, so I just stuck with that.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Prices. I have done alot of research on other candle companies and in local stores and have tried to price our candles as competitively as possible. Our prices are some of the lowest you'll find. I have also tried to make our site simple and easy to navigate. I believe many sites are too "busy" and hard to find what you're looking for.
What is your eventual goal?
Our goal is to grow a profitable business to the point where my husband can quit his job and we can both work on the candle business full time, possibly hiring one or two employees to help.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Right now pretty much all of our profits go back into buying candle supplies and we aren't able to buy everything in bulk so that is kind of touch, but our inventory of supplies continues to grow so that there are fewer things that we need to buy often and business is starting to grow, so I anticipate that soon we'll be able to save more and then be able to buy in larger bulk pretty much everything we need so that our overhead cost will be much less in the long run.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I think I would spend the money to have an SEO analysis done on my site by GNC Web Creations. I would also look into spending more on a different shopping cart and of course on advertising.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I think so. If nothing else, we could always hire someone to help out.
What has been your biggest challenge?
I would have to say designing the website. It has taken many times over to get the design/layout looking professional and then adding a shopping cart into it. Also search engine optimization. Although some of the pages are on the first page of search on Google, I have quite a few others that still need alot of tweaking to get them there so that the website traffic can increase.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Definately search engine optimization. I think most of our visitors come from Google or some other search engine.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
I plan on keeping this site up as far as I can see. I will continue to work on building traffic and new customers even if things look like they aren't growing much. Eventually it will pay off.
What is your website address?
Homemade Candle Creations
