Thursday, July 26, 2012

Phoenix Tea Updates

Most readers of this blog already know about Cinnabar's and my tea shop, Phoenix Tea, in Burien, WA. Cinnabar started the company back in 2010 and I joined her in July 2011. Together we have nearly twenty years of tea selling and tea writing experience. Things are going well for our store and we currently have over 80 great teas in stock. In fact, Cinnabar just recently launched an improved website and we're offering 15% discount on all web orders through the end of July with this code: JulySiteLaunch

It is now our desire to reach out to some restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, spas, and natural health clinics that want to serve their clients the very best loose leaf tea. Would you or someone you know be interested in meeting with me about the possibility of buying our teas at wholesale prices to serve to your clients? If you are local, I'd be happy to visit your shop or host you at mine. Wherever you may be, we offer free samples and will work with you to put together the perfect selection of teas based on your knowledge of your clients tea preferences and your own tastes. We carry many of the usual suspects such as Earl Grey, Genmaicha, Peppermint etc... and we also have many more exotic / high-end offerings for sale. I am always happy to consult with our clients, for free, about building/expanding your tea menu and the best way to prepare our teas at your venue. Please call (206-495-7330) or email (brett@phoenix-teashop.com) for more information. Thank you!

3 comments:

Alex Zorach said...

I like the new website a lot. I find it to look significantly sleeker and easier to navigate than the other one, so good job there!

I notice that links to the old website are broken and have not been redirected, you all may want to look into this, especially if there are any links that are actually sending traffic to your site. Also, the error page that I get when following a broken link is not particularly useful...you might at least want to make an error page. I outline some ideas of how to handle errors in my post Link Permanence - The Importance Of Keeping The Same URL Scheme, so that might help you recover some of the lost traffic (if you get any) coming to your website through links that have become broken links.

I don't know anything about how important your site is or how many sales you make through it, but if your site is at all like any of the websites I've ever administered, you're probably getting a significant number of visitors who land through a lot of random links on your site, so it might be worth fixing, especially if you can do so easily!

Alex Zorach said...

* I realized I didn't finish my thought..."make an error page that shows your site's navigation header and points the user towards locating your teas"

Unknown said...

Alex, thank you for your feedback. In this case, keeping the site directory structure (URLs) was not an option. Or more accurately, I should say that the benefits of retaining a handful of legacy links was vastly outweighed by the advantage of adopting a better system. I rebuilt the site completely from the ground up, and the e-commerce platform that the old site was built on was structured in a way that was pretty lame, so hobbling the new site with that old structure would have been an unreasonable compromise. I have created specific redirects for any old links I knew about, and I'll add more if they come to my attention.

I agree with you about the 404 page needing to be more functional, and I'll revise it.