Difficulty off selling online for small private camera shops

[Timmie]

I've been in both the Photography and the Internet business, when I was at school I worked selling cameras in Jessops, when I left I worked as a professional photographer (specialising in wildlife), and now I'm working on the Internet as a marketing manager for a website design company.

Recently we have launched a website for a small privately owned photography shop www.dig-it-all.co.uk who have had an established shop in Wells in the heart of Somerset for around 30 years.

To say the very least they are finding it very difficult on the Internet, used to capitalizing on an excellent 'local' reputation for customer service, this simply doesn't seem to matter online. I am really interested in any feedback that as buyers, you guys might have on their website and also what you feel makes the difference between you spending online or not?

Personally this is the kind of company I buy my equipment from myself as ultimately I know I have someone to go back to and that they're an authorised Canon supplier. I do hope this post doesn't seem too much like a commercial bung, as a buyer myself, and an Internet professional I am genuinly interested in your opinion on this one. Many thanks for your time.

[cyberlord]

How recently? It takes a while to establish a web presence and have it circlulate through all the search engines. What have you done to promote the webpage? That's more important that the actual webpage itself. You can't just launch a webpage and expect the masses to flock to it.

Add your site's address to all the search engines so they can crawl it. Publish it's presence in new releases on photo web sites (if allowed).

There are tricks to get you webpages to show up higher up in search engines but I won't go into them here. You can search for them yourself. Most take time, but they do work. My webpages show up on google on the first page using the right criteria and I have used the methods myself so I know it works. It just takes time.

Tim