Name of your website?Yo-Yo Hobbies
Your name?
Steve Lewis
Your Location (city, etc)
Fairview, Oregon
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We are a hobby store specializing in hobbies the whole family can participate in. The sailing ship model kits are all based upon the historic sailing vessels of yesteryear. The doll houses range from the simple to the very complex. We also offer doll house accessories such as furniture and electrical kits.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
My wife, Janet is retired from the National Guard. I am semi retired but still work in the outside world as a driver for a local company. There are many reasons for our website. The first is that we wanted to create something that provided products the whole family could participate in. Second we wanted to include hobby products that had historical value.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We created our first website two years ago. It was mainly informational relating to crafts and how create various craft projects. That site no longer exists
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Some time ago we had a kitten that wouldn't stay down when put on the floor or removed from my desk. It had to see everything up close. The kitten wound up being called Yo-Yo on that basis. We also believe in having fun. That required a fun name. It seemed appropriate and unique.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
I would have to say that the design of our site is user friendly and simple to navigate. I have seen many, many retail sites of all types that are cluttered, difficult to navigate, and confusing to the user. Our goal was to create a site that the user could use without a computer science degree.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Our intention is to keep the website up and running. Of course, the income is a plus. We are having a good time with this. There are no plans to sell it.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Just having gotten started the site isn't supporting itself yet. This is changing as time goes by. For now the scales are tipped to the expensive side. The economy isn't helping. We will soon be expanding our offerings and expect improvement soon.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would expand our product line immediately. Then do more advertising. I would like to do some advertising in focused magazines. Right now we are advertising on the web with Yahoo and Google.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
We hope the website expands. Keeping up with demand shouldn't be a problem. I have no intention of becoming an Amazon.com or anything that big. Our first goal is to keep our promise of personal customer service alive.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
We have the domain name registered with one company and the site hosted with another. The company maintaining the domain name, (I won't give the company name), is a problem. Their customer service is horrible. The company hosting our site has fantastic customer service and a great track record with us. They are really responsive. We recently had an issue that they responded to in about an hour. All based upon an email from us. We will be transferring our domain names to them very soon.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge has been the concept of our website and our base values. Then developing the website around that concept. It's easy to throw up a site and get it running. The hard part for has been in keeping the original concept and values intact.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Promoting our site has been done mainly with our products and keywords. Of course the pay-per-click advertising has helped a great deal as well.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Keeping the website up and running has been easy for us. I have a degree in computer science that has helped quite a bit. The programming is simple. The SEO has been somewhat of a challenge. The time invested to produce and maintain our site was more than expected.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We have been live for 5 months now. Our intentions are to keep it running for the foreseeable future. We expect to be around for a long time.
What is your website address?
Yo-Yo Hobbies
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