Website Woes

Websites as a way to reach customers have their pros and cons.  A website is a great way to put all your marketing information in one place that can be accessed anytime by anyone with a phone.  But you do have to maintain it and keep things up-to-date.  If you like marketing it's not that bad.  

From a long time I have been an abysmal marketer of my business. I'd rather install 100 ten-foot fence posts than have to do marketing.  For this reason it was only last year that I finally decided to set up a website.  I looked at how others are doing it and noticed that just about everyone uses a website building and hosting service offered by large companies like WordPress and Squarespace. I looked at how these sites were working under the hood and then I looked at what they were charging and how much they controlled everything and decided to build my own website. 

At first I planned to buy the rights to a web template I liked and then just change the the pictures, colors, and text in the html files.  Then I found a website called HTML5 Up that offers some excellent templates for free.  I selected one of those templates and then set about configuring it to my liking.  

The nice thing about building a website is that it forced me to articulate what I was selling.  Fortunately, I had answered enough customer questions by that point to know most of what I needed to put in the website.  I needed to describe what makes my product unique (grass-fed, local, humane harvest, focus on quality, etc).  I also needed to answer questions about what they were getting for their hard earned cash.  This means a detailed breakdown of how much of what types of cuts is made available when a customer purchases an eighth, quarter, half, or whole bison.  

And this is where the website threatened to become challenging.  As you can see in the above image, a lot of detailed info is being provided.  The current image is what a customer would get this winter from a whole bison, and the cuts listed is different for the other portion sizes.  This data is based upon what was returned from the butcher in previous years, but that can change.  If I switch to a new butcher and the new butcher offers a different breakdown of meat (like less ground and more steak options) then I'll need to be able to update that info on each page which is a tedious process prone to mistakes.  

After I pick up the meat from the butcher, but before I deliver the cuts to the customer, I weigh and count every single cut of meat and enter that info into a spreadsheet. It is this information that i use to calculate the data I use to update my website for the following year.  As stated previously this takes a long time and its easy to fat-finger in the wrong info.  My solution was the following: 1) write a short Python script that converts the info from the spreadsheet to a JSON file, 2) add a small block of JavaScript to the html file that reads and parses the JSON file into variables, and 3) modify the html for the webpage to use these variables to construct a webpage that looks like what you see above. 

Now if I want to update all of the pages at once I only have to run the Python script and upload the new JSON file.  Something that only takes a few seconds.  

Unfortunately, while it works quite well, I'm not sure it's very compatible with search engines so I may have to rethink that part of it.  On the other hand, in my opinion, Search Engine Optimization is a ridiculous and ever-changing game that too many people think is going to solve all of their problems.  The real way to reach new customers is to go out to local fairs and set up a booth.  Something I plan on doing later this summer.