Business: websites – outside looking in

Sometimes, I’m amazed at how much work is involved in running an online shop.  Seriously!  I would never have imagined that it would take this much work, but it does and it’s not the simplest of processes.  It’s fairly easy to set up a basic shop and sell things online but to take it further than that is actually quite demanding and in light of what I’ve been up to this past few weeks, it is this area of business I want to talk about in this blog post.

Walter Scott monument – Edinburgh

This month I have done quite a bit of work on my website teageeks.com.  And while it might not look like it has changed much from the outside, I have spent a lot of my time learning about how to operate it from the inside.  Earlier this month, I went on a 3 day training course in Edinburgh to learn how to use the software from which teageeks.com runs.  This was a really great opportunity for me to learn a lot in a short space of time.  You see, no-one has taught me how to maintain or update a website.  I’ve been learning as I go.  This takes up a lot of time and means that if I decide to implement something (like the twitter feed on the home page) I have to search the web on how to do something before I can do it.  I find this information mainly from videos, forums and wikis and often I can’t find my answer, or I implement the change and it doesn’t work.  Back to the web.  This has been a laborious process so far and I’m really happy with the website so far, however it was my hope that by doing a training course and learning how to use the software that my website runs from, it would save time and money in the long run and will free up time to focus on other areas like marketing, sales or improving processes.

View of Calton Hill – Edinburgh

The course, which I would highly recommend, was run by Mage Training.  It was a 3 day course and the trainer (Deryck) was impressive with his knowledge of Magento.  It was informative and clearly explained, with an easy to follow structure.  And I even left with a bumper-size manual outlining everything that was covered in the classes, which will be priceless as a reference tool.  I would honestly recommend this course to anyone who has a Magento store and wishes to get it up and running.  The only thing I would say is that it covered a lot of ground, therefore being familiar with the admin area of Magento would be really useful and would, in my opinion, allow you to get more out of the course.

Business: Starting up…

I was thinking about my blog this week (mainly because I was feeling guilty for not having written anything in 2 weeks) which led me to ponder the difficulties and pressures I face in maintaining a website, blog, social media platforms etc etc for my business as well as chasing up sales leads, going to business start up workshops, completing VAT returns, researching for new stock, and a million other things along with working full-time (my venture into tea is a hobby at the moment).  So, while sitting on all this information and most likely sipping on a cuppa, I thought to myself, “Why don’t I write about my journey into business as well as tea?”  I’ve created a blog to write about tea because that’s what I’m interested in however, my journey into the world of business has so far proven to be demanding, challenging and fun!  So why not write about it as well to showcase not only my tea but the growth of the tea business also.

So having thought about it, I realised that it has benefits and I genuinely think it will prove to be a useful tool for me.

For the customers: the daily challenges of me setting up a business (teageeks.com) should be something that I share with my everyone, as it allows people to see how the company is developing and growing itself and allows for transparency, adding value to each transaction for the customer.

For me and for the business, to write down the mistakes and lessons learned adds another layer and depth to the learning process.  It allows me to gather my thoughts and record them.  It means that I will reflect and make time to process what I am doing and how I am doing it, which will (hopefully!) help me in making my business efficient and focussed. Retrospectively, I will be able to sit down and actually see the growth and learning curve of the business which unfortunately is something which is difficult to do just now without any recordings of the what, why, when and how.  I read business articles every week about people starting up in busines

For the general public: perhaps someone will come across my posts while researching about staring a small business.  It may serve as inspiration for the people, who like me, were sitting on an idea for a while and spent hours researching small businesses, start-up information and reading about other people’s experiences in starting their own business.  By reading my posts it may help someone to realise that yes, it is possible to start-up on your own.

Well, that’s the first post done.  So I’ll end it with one of my favourite inspiring quotes (oh, how I love quotes!)

 

Here’s to the next one and many more!