Hi, everyone!
It's been a few weeks since we've featured one of our own Community members, but we're back! This week, I want to introduce you to @VickiW!
You may have seen Vicki around the Community, especially in our Vote on Features section. Check out some of her recent ideas: Invoice Format, Display Product Quantities, and Display and edit product quantity info on the Edit Category page.
Here's what else Vicki had to say:
1. Tell us a bit about yourself (personal, professional, whatever you'd like to share).
I am a former project manager now living the dream of selling hand dyed fabrics. I started my business in 2009 and it was a offshoot of the blogging that I've been doing for 10 years. My blog readers saw the fabric I was dyeing and started asking for it. I opened an Etsy shop and never looked back.
My husband and I enjoy a low key life in a beautiful rural area near Richmond, VA (USA) and have lived in Virginia most of my life. My business is a perfect complement to my primary hobby of quilting but I do a lot of mosaic and fused glass.
2. Describe your personal/professional relationship with Weebly. How long have you been using Weebly? How did you get started?
Within the past 2 years I felt it was time to bring my blog and Etsy shop together into one web presence. I just couldn't find the motivation to invest the time in making that happen. I was given the gift of that time when I had to spent 6 weeks nursing a massive case of tendinitis in my knee. During the first week of my recliner recovery I decided to allocate 3 hours each to several web platforms and see just how much I could get set up in a few hours time.
On Shopify every time I entered a product the site would crash. I know that's not normal but I figured if I was going to have technical issues that early then that platform wasn't for me. I never got one page up on Squarespace. It may look beautiful and elegant but working in it is like learning a foreign language. On Weebly I had about 15 pages created in 3 hours and that included web pages, blog pages and products in a store.
3. What resources were most helpful to you when you first got started with Weebly?
I watched almost every online video and got some great chat and phone support. The video library was key!
4. What advice would you give to a new Weebly user?
Watch the videos and ask for help. Weebly isn't perfect, no platform is, but at least there are people behind Weebly that seem to sincerely want to help and want you to be successful with your web site. All that said, it's still your web site and you are going to have to learn about things (like SEO, Alt Tags and meta tags) that you can't avoid if you want your site to get the right amount of traffic. Weebly is just one of the tools in your toolbox. Unless you are paying someone to set up and manage your site, you need to plan on investing some serious time into keeping your site relevant and active.
5. What is the best part of using Weebly? What is one improvement that you would like to see in the future?
Ease of use. It's quite intuitive and easy to create and manage pages.
From my forum participation it's clear that there are several things that I would like to see in Weebly but if there was one thing that could magically appear tomorrow I'd ask for the product quantity to display no matter how much of a product is available. I sell fabric by the half yard and my customers have no idea how much is available until it get's down to 2.5 yards or less. So they have to play a guessing game and try to enter quantities to see if there might be enough. For the life of me I see no logical reason for not displaying the quantity available but for a fabric seller, or anyone who sells limited quantities of an item, that feature really hurts my business.
Thanks for reading! Until next week...
Erin
Weebly Community Manager
