Another new website?
March 1st 2021 starts a new era for Wooden Roots with the launch of the Wooden Roots website 3.0. “Did you not just get a new website” I hear you say? Why yes we did, how kind of you to remind us that we did indeed launch website 2.0 in January 2019. Should we talk about the mis-guided disaster that our Website 2.0 became or shall we remain positive and focus on 3.0? I think the latter is what we shall do as it’s always better to have a positive approach in this life rather than moan about “woulda, coulda, shoulda”.
Right, well if you are reading this blog then you are indeed on our brand new and shiny website which we will now refer to as 3.0. Gone is the 2.0 version, which was slow, clunky and ever so difficult to edit and change (oops - I digress - keeping positive Gemma)
Wow, so three times a charm? three times lucky? You get there in the end? Not sure but what we do know is that this all new Wooden Roots website 3.0 is a lot easier to maintain, run, change and we are now in complete charge. That’s right myself and Marcus are sailing this ship, nobody else. We have built this new Wooden Roots website 3.0 from scratch, we have taken the photos, we have entered the products, we have written the blogs - but we didn’t quite do it alone, we had a little bit of help. Here’s how it all came about;
Light at the end of a long tunnel
Several months ago whilst flailing around in the grips of Covid-19 alongside the entire world, feeling sorry for ourselves and wondering how to fix our website. We caught wind of a new initiative from East Suffolk Council & the Business Growth Coaches Network. The initiative was focussing on local businesses and giving those businesses digital advice. Within weeks of our first and free consultation we transferred our website from the grips of Wordpress and moved over to the light, bright and easy to use Squarespace. Wooden Roots (i.e. Marcus & Gemma) have created a simple website on the Squarespace platform which includes eCommerce so that you the customer can finally check out without issues and in turn we know that you have bought something so can send it right out. Seems so simple right? I know and maybe it is if you are a high tech guru with not much else to do but in our case, trust me that was just not the case so let’s leave it there. In short, we are a lot happier with the results we are now producing ourselves over a couple of months versus the struggle we had with the 2.0 version over 12 months+ with a so called dedicated and knowledgeable company.
In working with East Suffolk Council and their Digital Advice Service Initiative we were able to take advantage of a grant which we were able to apply to the costs incurred to switch over from Wordpress to Squarespace and also get help with SEO and switching over all our URL’s to the new site. East Suffolk Council also paid for free skills talks, over twenty talks which included such topics as Instagram for Business, Making movies for business, Working with Google My Business and so many more. We have attended them all and can apply all this learning now to our new Wooden Roots website 3.0 for which we are very proud of.
The moral of the story
Wooden Roots is a typical example of what can happen to so many small businesses in this digital era. Gemma and Marcus, although they lost a lot of money through this whole process managed to recompense some of that through a grant. They are now well on their way to being back in control of their website, it’s content and with no more hidden costs to worry about.
If you want to learn more about the East Suffolk Council Digital Service programme - here is the link
Wooden Roots is based in Suffolk, which is in the East of England. We are 90 minutes from London on the train and our nearest train station is Melton, Woodbridge.
