In this edition of TheLine, we spoke to Anton Neureiter, owner of Final Touch Interiors, LLC. Anton’s New York-based interior design business has an impressive online presence, including a blog and other interactive elements, all powered by a Jumpline.com J2-VDS web hosting package.
How long has Final Touch Interiors, LLC been in business, and how long have you been doing business online?
Final Touch Interiors has been in business for over 30 years, and we have had an online presence hosted by Jumpline.com for nearly 3 years now.
How does your website fit in with your "brick and mortar" interior design business?
It has become an important and integral part our business. A few years ago, having a website was not necessary in our industry, and would have generated little business. In today's age, almost every home has a computer, and people are using the Internet more and more to search for their necessities. Additional, e-mail is becoming a replacement for the fax and is used for business communications with the customer as well as the vendors.
Interestingly, the interior design business has adopted the changes more slowly than other businesses. However, there is now quite a bit more information available online; with one click, one can retrieve all necessary details from our vendors and forward them to the customers. Our website and email access are now crucial for us to be able to run our business.
Does most of your business and sales traffic come from your website, or is your website used to supplement your existing offline advertising?
Our traditional advertising has almost entirely disappeared, and our local advertisements are at a low point. In today's market you can advertise with one of the big search engines and select your geographical region, ad words, timing etc. Ad campaigns can be stopped at any time, and changes such as adjusting keywords can be done very quickly and easily. You receive immediate feedback if your ad campaign is working, and it is nice not to be locked in to any contracts.
Your site looks great, and contains a wealth of information and images; how do you manage all of the content and maintain such an expansive site?
In the beginning, it was not very difficult; we just kept building the site up over time. Now, however, we are working on our third revision of our web site and it has become very time intensive to make necessary changes and keep every thing up to date.
For example, we created our first web site using a template that we purchased online and customized to our needs. It looked good, but was very poorly optimized for search engines even though customers liked it.
Our next step included adding more content, which is king of every web site. We are now working on fine-tuning the content of our website to be more search engine friendly in an effort to increase traffic.
We do all of the work on the website in-house, which is obviously a slower approach, but it has been very rewarding. It is always nice to see a revenue increase just from re-writing content in a search engine friendly way!
I see that you have a blog on your site, "24/7talk Interior Design"; how does the blog fit in to your website and online marketing strategy?
I simply started to blog to attract more customers to our web site. A business blog should be seen as a tool to attract additional business to your site. More stories and blog entries, or more content, makes your site more interesting for search engines. Your traffic goes up as you saturate your website with more keywords in reference to your business and therefore your site becomes more of an authority in your specific market. It can be quite difficult to maintain and keep up a business blog in addition to running a business, so even I am a little behind in posting at the moment.
What makes Final Touch Interiors different from other interior design companies on the web?
I believe that there are only a small number of interior designers or others in our industry that have a website as well as the capability to handle their own web design and web business strategy themselves. This is our strong advantage compared to the competition, and I will continue to react to market conditions and adjust our business plans and website strategy accordingly.
What's next for your business and the Final Touch Interiors website?
We are working to get our third revision of our website finished, which is not an easy task. We also plan to expand our blog even further, in addition to adding an online forum for interior design. Additionally, we are planning to add an online store where visitors will be able to order certain products right from the website.
Finally, do you have any advice for others who are trying to launch their first interactive business site similar to yours?
First of all, be sure to have a good hosting company like Jumpline. Not having to deal with the daily issues of running a web server frees up quite a bit of time for a business owner, allowing you to concentrate fully on web site development.
Second, you don't have to have a large web site from the beginning. Start slowly and keep on building constantly. Success on the web does not come immediately -- it takes time. When working on developing the site, be sure to validate your HTML and CSS. By always doing so, search engines will like you much more!
Third, keep track of your Web Site constantly. There are many statistic tools out there to help you in improving your site, and many even suggest what has to be done to be more successful.
Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions and share your web business wisdom, Anton!
