By John Jones
City of Sails Marine Brokers in Auckland are an excellent example of a "new business" style company that has shunned the traditional crippling overheads of retail space in favour of building a strong web presence.Owners, Blair Harkness and Janis Marler are thrilled with the new website. "We're now sporting a fresh new look and feel, and have gone from using manually entered pages for our boat listings to being database driven", says Blair.
This is a showcase example of the Go Kiwi Internet Product Database Module. To see how it works look at their yachts for sale page, and especially the detailed information available for each boat. It's a great example of taking products online, but don't spend too long on their site or, like me, you might start having thoughts about converting unnecessary real estate into something with sails!
One of the exciting aspects about getting products on line is tapping into the vast power of Google. Try searching for a "Gladden 44" in Google and like most of their boats it comes up number one (#1 "Pages from NZ" option, #2 for "the web", at time of writing). This concept in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) terms is called working the "long tail of Search". In other words, there are a large number of low volume, but much more specific, phrases that people use to find things they're looking for every day online.
Being online doesn't mean being a faceless company that provides no service though. On the City of Sails website you'll see that Blair Harkness, Janis Marler and Skipper the dog are all there ready to give the customer a full service experience. Although one has to be careful to retain professionalism, little personal touches like Skipper can really help online viewers see that you're real people, ready to do business in an old fashioned Kiwi way even though you've embraced all this new Interweb stuff.
