Having become somewhat comfortable with wordpress, it was easy to make the decision to move one of my business informational sites to a blog platform and away from my 1997 style, cheesy pagemill generated format. As is usual with setting up a new format, there are many considerations to be made, including recognizing that the server you are working with will often choose that particular day to act up. Finally after a day of fighting the server, ignoring THIS blog, and the other business responsibilities I made it to the weekend.
One of the things I have learned in the last 10+ years, is that when you KNOW your business and understand down to the smallest component how things work, it is much easier to sell the parts with a confidence that people can recognize. There are about 500,000 online “stores,” where folks can go to an unknown source, with phones that are rarely answered, (if even available) and buy all types of electronic equipment, but only a few where you can read up, or contact to get advice before hand. The blog format fits the latter description.
There is no way to purchase directly on the site. I still maintain a “shopping cart” elsewhere, but feel this will add a valuable service to my dealer network, and retail customers, and even those who may not buy from us. And even though we do not sell directly from what is now the blog format, it adds to the confidence of dealing with the company we maintain by establishing a level of expertise in our customer’s minds prior to them dealing with us.