THE COFFEE WAREHOUSE
Blue Mountains, NSW
Responsive WordPress website (TheFox) . July 2016
www.coffeewarehouse.com.au
Visit the new responsive WordPress website design for The Coffee Warehouse with an existing A-shop in the back end. Scattered around the site is a hint of what was…so below I’ve included a blog I created when I first made the site. Read on!
To compliment The Coffee Warehouse, it’s sister company The Tea Warehouse (www.theteawarehouse.com.au) also required a matching look and feel. Both include links to the other site as well as online banners and adverts throughout the sites and shops.
Also created:
- logo amendments
- product packaging for coffee scrubs
- social media posts
A Quick & Dirty Solution to Hitting No. 1
Getting prime position with Google can take a bit of work on your part: making sure you’re Search Engine Optimisation is as fine tuned as possible in the back-end of your website, strategically stacking your text with key words and…ultimately aspiring to collect as many hits as possible on your site to make Google sit up and take notice.
While uploading a new responsive WordPress template for me to work on for The Coffee Warehouse, Andrew Broad had me in stitches as he told the tale of how the old site he built for them back in 2010 broke the internet…
Although his website had been happily ticking along and bringing in some clients, Andrew Phillips needed to boost sales of his exotic & aromatic freshly roasted coffee beans and classy coffee paraphernalia to promote his business further, so he decided to vamp up his website.
All it took was a bit of research and the ‘right’ photos. You see he had worked out that it was predominately men who bought his coffee machines online, but it was women who procured the coffee beans to feed the shiny metal beasts. Knowing this he aimed his new marketing ploy at the men, knowing it would ultimately be seen by their wives and girlfriends.
He reveled in playing ‘dirty’, scattering his website with a plethora of beautiful, scantily clad women in flimsy lingerie, draped provocatively around his coffee machines and sipping on their hot red cups. Grinning, he sat back and waited for all hell to break loose.
Wives and girlfriends told their friends, friends told other friends, and the whispered news about this new ‘naughty’ site spread like wildfire and people started to click through to see what all the fuss was about.
Now the average person isn’t going to be too offended by this type of image…we’re bombarded by it every single day in the media, in advertisements and magazines. I mean, how dare he sell coffee in this way…right?! But…there is always someone who is going to get their knickers in a knot and this wicked story was taken up by Essential Baby, an online offshoot linked into the Sydney Morning Herald. The Essential Baby’s forum went ballistic as women roared about this sexist site, demanding these ghastly images be removed due to their “offensive nature”. Women from all around Australia jumped on board, vented in earnest, dripping in hate or grinning from ear to ear over his audacity. Men thought it was the best thing EVER and the traffic to his site hit record highs. Google sat up and took notice all right, jet propelling him to the top of the “buy coffee online” search results and the sales started rolling in: The very women who were trying to destroy his business were in fact doing the exact opposite and Andrew couldn’t have been happier.
Sadly all good things must come to an end so bit by bit over time the offending images were removed as the site evolved, and today only a handful of images remain if you look hard enough. Andrew’s unique marketing ploy was a success and business is still booming as a result.
So the moral of the story is: If you want to get your site talked about, do something a little daring and different from your competitors that gets people talking, then rub your hands together in glee and watch the hits roll in.
Original blog article by Heather Frank