5 Steps I took to Create my Website! (And it's SUPER EASY)

[ALSL]

I posted a while back in the General Entrepreneurship forum, and I guess it took a while for MJ to okay the thread It received about 110 views but no replies

After some feedback from potential customers, friends and family, I decided to re-work the site as it was clearly not user-friendly enough.

This is the result: Home -teoTime

I could really use your feedback and answer any questions you guys may have.

Some Highlights:

#1: I built the website myself, no website dev for me.

#2: Wordpress + Woothemes: Superstore + Woocommerce + Woocommerce Subscriptions Plugin (Comment if you want to know about the dozen other plug-ins I used)

#3: Take the Code Academy "Web Fundamentals" course (it's free). You'll learn just enough about CSS that you can change most, if not all, of the visual aspects of your wordpress theme. CSS is all about logic. Find the right class/id then change it and test and test and test til you get the right changes. (Comment to ask me about how to do that and I'll try to answer it, but I basically brute-forced all the code Trial and Error baby!)

#4: I created all the icons in Photoshop. (HUGE trial and error there. But to put it into perspective: I learned everything I needed to learn about photoshop in like a week. All you have to do is google how to do certain things and then practice. Provided, I've always been more arts-oriented so it was very easy for me.)

#5: I bought a used Canon T2i with kit lens for $300. Borrowed a friend's tripod. Built a photo light box for about $3 dollars (provided I had three lamps lying around the house) and took pictures of my product. (Comment if you are interested in knowing more about that process.)

All in all, the website itself cost me less than $700 (and that's including the cost of the camera, if you can borrow someone's for free, more power to you!). The great thing about all this, is that everything I bought and/or learned I can use over and over again. Woothemes has no limits to how often you use the theme(s) you paid for. It's $70 for 3 themes. Woocommerce is free. Wordpress is free. If you want to use a payment gateway other than paypal then you have to pay $49 for each plugin, a one time fee.

Cheers,
ALSL

 

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[mayana]

Hey!

Good job! I like the idea a lot - I know a ton of people who are really into trying different teas.

Some of my suggestions (take them at face value... lol):

1. Remove the "powered by MailCheat(Chimp)" text and link that is underneath your signup box on your homepage.
2. I was a little surprised by the prices, but I know that fancy teas can be expensive. What I would need in order to spend this kind of cash is to be informed a little more in how amazing special, unique, exotic, etc, these teas are. I guess I want to be convinced a little more that these teas are really special (something I couldn't get locally).
3. In your product galleries, make sure you have alt descriptions and fill in all of the other fields for all of your pictures, so when people pull up the pictures, they say something descriptive instead of "product a closeup" or the like.
4. I would add some text to your contact us page - maybe consider even a phone number, and an explanation about how available and friendly you are, and how you love to receive feedback.
5. Testimonials!! Do you have any current subscribers that could shoot you a few blurbs about how happy they are with your tea?
6. I totally wanted to like your Facebook page, but I didn't see a link to it... gotta get the social aspect connected to the website

Good luck!!!

 

[DrkSide]

5. Testimonials!! Do you have any current subscribers that could shoot you a few blurbs about how happy they are with your tea?
6. I totally wanted to like your Facebook page, but I didn't see a link to it... gotta get the social aspect connected to the website

Personally these two from mayana are the most important. With both of these you can get the social proof that will give credibility to your service.

 

[ableme]

For me, your site loads really slow. But that might just be my connection here!

And for customers that do not want the mystery package, why don't you offer an option to just let them pick a flavor they want? I know the "surprise" is what your idea is basically about, but why limit yourself and your products to just that one option?

 

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[Vick]

sell anything yet?

 

[ALSL]

Hey!

Good job! I like the idea a lot - I know a ton of people who are really into trying different teas.

Some of my suggestions (take them at face value... lol):

1. Remove the "powered by MailCheat(Chimp)" text and link that is underneath your signup box on your homepage.
2. I was a little surprised by the prices, but I know that fancy teas can be expensive. What I would need in order to spend this kind of cash is to be informed a little more in how amazing special, unique, exotic, etc, these teas are. I guess I want to be convinced a little more that these teas are really special (something I couldn't get locally).
3. In your product galleries, make sure you have alt descriptions and fill in all of the other fields for all of your pictures, so when people pull up the pictures, they say something descriptive instead of "product a closeup" or the like.
4. I would add some text to your contact us page - maybe consider even a phone number, and an explanation about how available and friendly you are, and how you love to receive feedback.
5. Testimonials!! Do you have any current subscribers that could shoot you a few blurbs about how happy they are with your tea?
6. I totally wanted to like your Facebook page, but I didn't see a link to it... gotta get the social aspect connected to the website

Good luck!!!

Thanks so much for the feedback!

As we're extremely new, we don't have any testimonials because we haven't delivered any subscriptions yet. We are going to have 3 subscribers (deliveries) for April 26th. We'll be able to ask those people for their testimonials We're also planning to give our teas to people we know for them to sample so they can give testimonials too

We're also working on populating our Facebook page so that there's at least some content in there for people who want to like us. Nobody wants to like or share a page that has nothing on it

Canadian shipping is also killer. When it comes down to it, our prices are so high because we provide free shipping on top of having quality tea. As our subscribers increase and we have more volume we can start to create unique exclusive teas blended by us, but for now we're relying on taste-testing wholesalers and picking their microblends that we enjoyed the most. Also, our prices probably won't be able to compete with any American franchises/companies, but in Canada we're pretty competitive when it comes to our subscription plans. We have three direct competitors and our prices are match (while we actually give MORE tea for the same price point).

Again, THANKS SO MUCH!

 

[ALSL]

#1. Sorry about the site hahaha, I've already tried reducing all the image sizes, and we actually load faster than the leading online tea retailers: Adagioteas, DavidsTea and Teavana.

#2. We are going to be adding our monthly teas for standalone purchases to our store every month. People will have to pay shipping for standalone teas with free shipping at $50+ subtotals. The reason we don't have that right now is because it's our first month of operation. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to give a 1 tea subscription because any reasonable price would become instantly unreasonable once people factor in shipping (and we can't give free shipping on anything less than a $50 purchase because that would eat away at our margins so much that it wouldn't be worth going into business anymore).

We're starting off with one service. Once we have the volume and we can negotiate rates for shipping + importing our own freights instead of relying on wholesale margins, we'll look into calculating if it makes sense to offer other options for subscription


Thanks for your feedback!

 

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[ALSL]

I made a direct sale, my partner made one direct sale, and we got one cold sale from Reddit. It's a slow start but we were having problems with our website for the better part of April. We feel that our site now is user friendly enough that we can start concentrating more on selling. Also, after our first month we'll have testimonials and also standalone teas to purchase, which will give potential customers more confidence in us (we're hoping).

For us to break even on our variable costs per month, we would need 14 subscribers in total (continued subscribers). So 7 subscribers Month A and 7 subscribers month B because people get billed once every 2 months. We're giving this business venture 1 year. If we can't even serve 14 subscribers who don't cancel in 1 year, then the idea for us just isn't viable. Of course we'll be doing testing and all that other good stuff, but we feel that 14 repeat customers is an extremely reasonable expectation considering we're very confident that once a customer tastes our tea, they'll be hooked

 

[JamesS88]

I appreciate your thread, I think your site looks good too.

(Comment if you want to know about the dozen other plug-ins I used)

I just started tinkering with wordpress recently, I'm definitely interested.

 

[brandonrush]

How are you marketing your tea subscription service to potential customers? What are you doing to gain new subscriptions?

 

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[ALSL]

How are you marketing your tea subscription service to potential customers? What are you doing to gain new subscriptions?

At the moment, we're just trying to get alpha customers. We're offering a lifetime 15% discount on subscriptions and 10% lifetime discount on all future teoTime products to our first 50 customers. We're contacting friends to tell them we've started a tea business. We're not direct selling to friends as I think that's a terrible way to do business (you don't want one-off pity buys, especially for our business, we want customers that love our product and WANT to shop from us). By TELLING our friends and just asking for feedback, they'll know that we're starting a tea company and anytime they think of tea they'll think of us. They may also bring us up if they have friends that like tea. We're also going to be giving away samples of our tea to people we know so that we can get some real testimonials.

We've also tinkered with posting on Reddit. We're going to be posting on Steepster as well and contributing to TeaChat forum. Basically, we want to hit up all "free" traffic sources before moving on to paid advertising as we're trying to keep cash costs low.

Currently, I'm reading books on copywriting so that as our list grows we can make use of it.

 

[ALSL]

I appreciate your thread, I think your site looks good too.



I just started tinkering with wordpress recently, I'm definitely interested.

I'm actually currently in Hong Kong to visit family. Will be here til May 9th before returning to Canada. I could work on a small guide for you if I have some down time or when I get back from Canada. I think a lot of people can benefit from what I struggled through. I actually tried building a simple site from the ground up, but it just wasn't worth my time. I basically spent about $200-300 in mistakes, mistakes that others could easily avoid if I could tell people hahahaha.

I'll throw up a simple site with a step by step guide to what I did. I'll link you when it's complete?

 

[AbbottMary]

I like it, its very minimalist and the style is great. Are you manufacturing the tea? or buying it from elsewhere and branding it?

 

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[ALSL]

I like it, its very minimalist and the style is great. Are you manufacturing the tea? or buying it from elsewhere and branding it?

At the moment, we're buying from wholesalers and branding. When our volume increases to justify it, we'll blend our own teas and freight in containers

 

[joschi]

Hey ALSL

I really like the result of your work. its a really clean and nice looking page.
Mayana had some good points which you should consider!

As we building a WordPress based page our selves at the moment i would love to talk to you about some technical stuff and which plugins you used.
I am sure we can learn from each other! Please consider to build in some security features. I wont expose the potential leaks here so i will write you a PM... When you have closed them we can post them here

May your sales rise!

With kind regards
Patrick

 

[HD_edacity]

Wow your site looks amazing, really hope you update on how exactly you made the site and what plugins you used. Your site reminds me of skinnymetea , those guys are only about a year old and are hitting 600k/month in profits that's nuts! lots of money in tea apparently but come to think of it my parent drink chai 3-4 times a days

 

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[ALSL]

Wow! They're definitely a model to be considering. Health benefits of tea are a risky area to deal with, but they definitely went the weight-loss/health route and it looks like it paid off!

They're prices are also super high LOL, even higher than ours! If they're turning a profit then it's most definitely the marketing and the "utility" of the tea that's doing the selling, not necessarily the taste. VERRY interesting! I'm so glad you brought it up

As I've now got 2-3 people saying they're interested in what I did to make the site, I will definitely work on creating a simple guide when I get back from Hong Kong

 

[1step]

Another option for themes is elegant themes, you pay around $50.00 and have access to all 70 ish of their themes plus free support to help customize your theme.

The theme you were using last time I looked at your site actually looked very much like an elegant themes theme I have used.

A recent blog entry I read on Tim Ferriss' blog had a profile about SkinnyMeTeas (i think) if you havent seen that you may want to check it out. you might pickup on something valuable from it

 

[Strive]

Have you considered adding more than just tea subscriptions to sell? I see you offer a free bamboo tea spoon w/ a subscription, maybe add that as a separate product to sell, giving the free spoon with the subscription added value in the customers eyes since you've now just given the spoon a price. Then you could possibly add tea accessories such as strainers, teapots, etc to add some variety. Just spitballing some ideas

 

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[ALSL]

Another option for themes is elegant themes, you pay around $50.00 and have access to all 70 ish of their themes plus free support to help customize your theme.

The theme you were using last time I looked at your site actually looked very much like an elegant themes theme I have used.

A recent blog entry I read on Tim Ferriss' blog had a profile about SkinnyMeTeas (i think) if you havent seen that you may want to check it out. you might pickup on something valuable from it

I actually did pay for ElegantThemes but found them to be a waste of my money for ecommerce. The reason behind that is that you have to re-code any ecommerce engine/shopping-cart plugin that you'll want to use with their themes.

With woothemes, all their themes are geared towards fitting with woocommerce. Woocommerce is extremely versatile which is why I ended up using Woothemes. The previous theme used was also a woothemes theme hahaha. I spent a good $300-400 in testing and mistakes before finally settling on something that was easy enough for me to customize and versatile enough to run a subscription-based store.

 

[ALSL]

Have you considered adding more than just tea subscriptions to sell? I see you offer a free bamboo tea spoon w/ a subscription, maybe add that as a separate product to sell, giving the free spoon with the subscription added value in the customers eyes since you've now just given the spoon a price. Then you could possibly add tea accessories such as strainers, teapots, etc to add some variety. Just spitballing some ideas

Yes, all of that is actually in the works.

The way we're doing things is to add the mystery teas of the past months to a store. That way the store is ever growing. Also, we can gauge which teas are worth stocking and which teas are not worth stocking based on feedback.

 

[AbbottMary]

Hey would you mind pointing me in the direction of where to find more info about buying wholesale and branding your own product? Im having a bit of trouble figuring out where to go from here...

 

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[ALSL]

Hey would you mind pointing me in the direction of where to find more info about buying wholesale and branding your own product? Im having a bit of trouble figuring out where to go from here...

I don't know how everyone else does it. There's probably also a much easier way to do it and you could find it in the forum search.

But, the way I found my wholesaler(s) was to first google so "loose leaf tea wholesale vancouver" for example.

Then my partner and I personally visited each and everyone that we thought would fit us. We ended up picking the one where we could speak with the owner. We had pre-reqs of course, like the wholesaler had to have their own farms, etc.

When it comes to branding, we did that all manually. What that means is that we bought tea pouches wholesale, then labels, then we applied the labels manually ourselves.

That's about it. If we didn't mind risking more and just decided to make a larger order of tea pouches, we could've sunk $2000 into a large batch of tea pouches and heat-stamped our logo on them, which would've made our lives easier.


It's all really just spending the time and physically (or phoning) the wholesalers and having a talk with them.

 

[HD_edacity]

Hey ALSL your from Canada too! Nice! Now i'm even more interested, how did you get all the info with health Canada straight? I'm looking into supplements, and there are just so many hopes you got to jump through, looks like there's regulation for tea as well.

 

[ALSL]

Hey ALSL your from Canada too! Nice! Now i'm even more interested, how did you get all the info with health Canada straight? I'm looking into supplements, and there are just so many hopes you got to jump through, looks like there's regulation for tea as well.

You literally should just call them up and ask about all the regulations and the certificates you need.

Tea's regulations can be bypassed as long as we don't package or mix the tea in a non food safe area.

We also legally can't store our product in our houses.

I was actually super curious about that. Apparently, home businesses aren't allowed to store any of their products at home-base. However, inspections are done based on phone-ins and requests. So even the person I talked to said that they know there are many people who break the rule, but they'll never find out because inspections are only done based on reports

 

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[joschi]

Hi ALSL,

did you implemented the security features? I have tested a little more with wp and know a good plugin to accomplish this easy and fast.
And i am still waiting for your reply which plugins you used

with kind regards
Patrick

 

[ALSL]

Hi ALSL,

did you implemented the security features? I have tested a little more with wp and know a good plugin to accomplish this easy and fast.
And i am still waiting for your reply which plugins you used

with kind regards
Patrick

I have just returned to Canada! I'm super tired because I couldn't sleep on the 12 hour flight, but I will be implementing your security suggestions asap.

What is the name of the plugin for that?

I will also post a list of the plugins I used + a little description about each one.

 

[joschi]

Currently we are testing and using:

Better WP Security -> to get the overall security up.
Plus
Wordfence Security-> to scan for mailware and viruses.

Make shure you backup your whole installation before installing and configuring one of these, as they have a deep inpact in your installation.
For me they work fine

 

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[michellepinto]

If we didn't mind risking more and just decided to make a larger order of tea pouches, we could've sunk $2000 into a large batch of tea pouches and heat-stamped our logo on them, which would've made our lives easier.

But then that doesn't make it your own product does it. You're buying tea from a whole seller and just labeling it as yours. Another business could buy the same tea and label it as theirs. That doesn't differentiate your brand from the others does it? I mean i think i have heard of this before but just confused as to how it can work?

 

[ALSL]

But then that doesn't make it your own product does it. You're buying tea from a whole seller and just labeling it as yours. Another business could buy the same tea and label it as theirs. That doesn't differentiate your brand from the others does it? I mean i think i have heard of this before but just confused as to how it can work?

I don't understand where you're coming from?

This is how the majority of tea retailers sell their tea. Retailers buy tea grown by farmers or wholesalers and then brand the tea to make it "their" product. Very few retailers have the resources to have their own tea farms across the world. Very few retailers have the necessary volume to sustain those costs.

It's the same as re-selling pre-manufactured widgets under your logo, your brand and your warranty. It effectively becomes "your" product.

Or were you wondering about the heat-stamping part?

When I say "tea pouches" I mean literally the bag itself, not the tea. A tea "pouch" is not a tea bag. A tea bag is the little white thing that the tea is in that you dunk into the water to brew a cup of tea. A tea "pouch" is the foil pouch (or whatever other material) that loose leaf tea comes in. It's the container that holds the product.


The differentiating factors in our product are the extra-value components like customer service, the experience of the mystery subscription, and, yes, the packaging/branding. When we move on to blend our own micro-blends, then that becomes "our product" under your definition.