New coffee roasters' website - what do you think?

[CremaBean]

Hello everybody,

We are excited to introduce ourselves as a new family owned and operating coffee roasting company Crema Bean Coffee Roasters based in Naperville, IL.

We launched our website cremabean.com less than a month ago and would appreciate your feedback.

 

[quantumbeancoffee]

I like it! Clean, High quality pic. Also, I like the made to order aspect of the company. 10 years ago even "roasts dates" were unheard of on coffee bags. Blue bottle was the first I can remember that did this. This is even one better. Who's hosting your Webstore? Website? If you don't mind my asking.

 

[CremaBean]

Thank you quantumbeancoffee

This is the first website we ever created, and we used squerspace . They have a lot of tools that are easy to use, but there are some things missing that we would love to have on our site. For example, they don't have an option for a customer to create an account, no option for subscribers, etc. But overall we are happy with squerspace and their tech support.

 

[BoldJava]

If I may make a suggestion, I am very "place" oriented. While I am familiar with "847," I personally want to know locale. That is just my orientation.

I am not suggesting a home address or giving up privacy. I am saying, "We are in Evanston (Skokie, Woodstock, fill in the blank), home of the Northwestern University Wildcats. We have that same wildcat spirit in striking out on our own as two small business-persons who have developed a passion. We wish to share it with you, our neighbors, near and far..."

You get the drift. Use that locale to tell your "story." Story sells. I would also have pictures of you two roasting. Let us put a face with a product. Personalize it. Just 2 cents, for what it is worth.

 

[CremaBean]

BoldJava,

Very good point, thank you. We just added our location to Contact Us page. It will also give some clients better idea how long the priority shipping will take before placing the order, too.

 

[coffewalk]

here are my two cents to your website
Layout color very nice..........but.......

your website fails badly in SEO - Search Engine Optimization -
Just do a search for any of your coffee products you sell.
If you are not on the first page in natural search you will have a problem in
making real sales.
Is your business only about web sales or do you have a retail location too.
I would try to catch the local market around your are too.

Your landing page has no content,
Move your page about us to your front page so you have at least some content on your first page.
start a blog to talk about your roasting experiences
no sign up page for your regular customers
no real contact page where I can send any inquiry to you
the listing of your e-mail will mostly only invite spam mailers
talk more about your roasting experiences on your webpage - don't you want to sell your beans - show customers that you are an expert
look at your competition in your area and see what they are doing
There are many more items to be solved, please be aware a beautiful website does not make sales, its the content which makes it.
I leave it at that, this is not a personal critique on you, its more that most webhosters are just interested in selling for a cheap price some hosting but
leave the customer out in the cold when it comes to real website design and support

 

[coco]

It is a beautiful site, it's true. And I do think you get some mileage from that. An poorly designed, unattrative site will for sure be a deterrent, so a nice professional one is important, IMO.

I think the previous poster makes some good points, although "no real contact" strikes me as odd....there is an email link, and it functions.

Photos of yourselves? I dunno, double-edged sword if ya ask me. Sometimes it comes off a hokey; I like professional photos in the field, in the roastery, etc, but a smiling mom and pop pic won't lend credibility, IMO.

Here was what I thought was somewhat problematic: although the scrolling words over the graphic is lovely, if the font were larger or bolder, it would be easier to read.
It wasn't impossible by any means, but a bit distracting; I had to sort of work at it.

Lovely site, overall....get some plantation/source type info

 

[CremaBean]

your website fails badly in SEO - Search Engine Optimization -
Just do a search for any of your coffee products you sell.
If you are not on the first page in natural search you will have a problem in
making real sales.

coffewalk, thank you very much for taking your time reviewing our website. We really appreciated. It is exactly what we are looking for.
You are correct, it is a challenge for us to get on the first page on Google. We definitely need help here.

Is your business only about web sales or do you have a retail location too.
I would try to catch the local market around your are too.

As of right now, we sell our coffee online only and do not have any retail locations. We are looking into getting in some coffee shops, breakfast places and etc., but as of right now, we are online only.

Your landing page has no content,
Move your page about us to your front page so you have at least some content on your first page.

The platform we chose, does not have this option, but what we just did is we moved "Our Story" page into the home page.

start a blog to talk about your roasting experiences

It is a great idea, thanks. We do think about getting some information in some sort of blog.

no sign up page for your regular customers
no real contact page where I can send any inquiry to you
the listing of your e-mail will mostly only invite spam mailers

Squerspace does not offer this feature as of right now for regular customers to create their account and sign up for subscription, but we requested that and waiting for them to develop it. It is absolutely one of the donwpoints.
We do have a contact page. However, I guess you refer to these message boxes where people include their email, name and message. Personally for us, it's not a priority. It always bothers us when we cannot see the actual email and send the message the way we like it. It does not feel personal. And quite a few people we talked about it, feel the same way.
Spammers are very welcome to come and send us emails, but even they cannot find us on Google :lol:

talk more about your roasting experiences on your webpage - don't you want to sell your beans - show customers that you are an expert

This falls into blog category, and we do have some ideas about it.

There are many more items to be solved, please be aware a beautiful website does not make sales, its the content which makes it.
I leave it at that, this is not a personal critique on you, its more that most webhosters are just interested in selling for a cheap price some hosting but
leave the customer out in the cold when it comes to real website design and support

You are very right - only beautiful sites does not make any sales. Seems like you have a lot of experience here, and we do appreciate your feedback. We do need help here. However, we love roasting coffee and a lot business stuff we learn as we go. We build everything (except coffee roaster itself) on our own, so we got the start. Now it is time to improve it and we are grateful to you for pointing out where to begin.

 

[CremaBean]

It is a beautiful site, it's true. And I do think you get some mileage from that. An poorly designed, unattrative site will for sure be a deterrent, so a nice professional one is important, IMO.

I think the previous poster makes some good points, although "no real contact" strikes me as odd....there is an email link, and it functions.

Photos of yourselves? I dunno, double-edged sword if ya ask me. Sometimes it comes off a hokey; I like professional photos in the field, in the roastery, etc, but a smiling mom and pop pic won't lend credibility, IMO.

Here was what I thought was somewhat problematic: although the scrolling words over the graphic is lovely, if the font were larger or bolder, it would be easier to read.
It wasn't impossible by any means, but a bit distracting; I had to sort of work at it.

Lovely site, overall....get some plantation/source type info

coco, thank you for your review. We agree with you that only professional photos of the roastery can bring credibility. If I would put a photo of myself in there, it would stop any kind of traffic :lol:
We agree that the font needs to be a little more reader friendly. We just increased font size by couple points and we think it got easier to read.
We do have main information about plantations right next to the coffee description in "Coffee Store". We do not want to make item pages too busy.

 

[coffewalk]

There are always two sides to a website, one is the design and look of the webpages.
The second part of a webpage is content, this is what really counts. Content is king.

Just do a key word search with any of the big search engines for words like (roasted coffee beans, coffee bean roaster)
Think about what words would you put into the search column when you want to buy coffee.

Take a look at the results and analyze the webpages. In most of the cases the pages are colorwise or designwise not great but they all have content.

That makes money.

You are a beginner so it will not be easy to break in. But analyze what you can do do separate yourself from the crowd.

Like very much the fast change of your landing page.
That's what one has to do with a web page. Your Website is a alive

I recommend a change of the front page title too.we are passionate about what we do
Do what - the subject is missing here - passionate about what you do does not mean anything to the search engine
I believe you are passionate, but I don't want to scan the text of your page to find out your passion.

I would write it something lik this
we are passionate about roasting coffee beans to perfection

the important part is roasting coffee beans,
the word we are passionate is more a great catchphrase for the web visitor - not more!!!!
the roasting coffee beans is for search engines.

It's what you do (roasting coffee) and that's what your business is all about.

Now it is important that one uses normal casual writing and does not to much keyword stuffing.

Search engines are quite smart with their way to detect key word stuffing.
I recommend to add a picture of a coffee roasting machine, on the same page, add an interesting alt text description and the article becomes more relevand to coffee roasting.
Its always about writing a short descriptive story which adds content to your business.

 

[CremaBean]

We made some changes in wording today as you recommended, but I am sure we still have a long way to go in search engines. We also made a short video today how we roast our coffee and posted it on Youtube and uploaded on our front page. Hopefully, that will help with a search as well.

So our next step would be a blog page.

Thank you very much for taking your time and giving us tips how to increase the traffic to our website through Google search.

 

[coco]

I like the vids!

 

[Kilowatt]

Very attractive site, although I would perhaps change the text so it shows up better against the graphic background.

As far as content, it is a little scant, but no show stoppers.

Also, I would be careful how you sell the superiority of fluid bed roasting, the best coffees I have ever sampled came from drum roasters. Convection-only roasting produces a certain character of coffee, whereas drum roasters (when properly designed) use both direct heat and convection for a different character. To call either one a superior method, or to say that one takes more skill than another would, in my experience, be grossly inaccurate, and potentially insulting to any number of very skilled roasters out there. I would emphasize the positive and unique qualities of your coffees, which I'm sure are excellent, rather than (albeit indirectly) downgrading your fellow roasters.

Just my 2¢, take it for what it's worth.

 

[CremaBean]

Thank very much for your response. We made some changes to make the reading easier. And hopefully more friendly for google search engine.


Regarding fluid-bed roasters and drum roasters, it is everyone's personal choice. Some people like fluid-bed roasters, some prefer drum roasters, and others drink year old green mermaid coffee and doesn't know the difference. So we all are different here
The most important feature of fluid-bed roaster for us is humanly freshest personalized coffee possible. We can get it done with fluid-bed roaster as we can roast less than a pound of coffee if needed rather than roast 100lb and leave it sit until sold. About skill and professionalism, no one should get insulted as in our text there is nothing to get upset about. We listed the pros of fluid bed air roaster.


Thank you again for taking time in reviewing our site.