Name of your website?Diamonds Barbados
Your name?
Alan Schneider
Your Location (city, etc)
Bridgetown, Barbados
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Diamonds Barbados offers information on Diamonds International duty free jewelry stores in Barbados as well as jewelry buying guides, local charity events, local outings and other community information.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Diamonds International has several stores in the Caribbean, but we feel that the Barbados stores are as unique among all others as Barbados is among all Caribbean islands. We also have a very tight- knit group of employees and organize several annual charity events that we enjoy participating in, so the site offers us a chance to talk about some of the things we're doing as part of the local community.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We launched our site in May of 2000, which was www.diamondsbarbados.com.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
DiamondsBarbados is simply a combination of "Diamonds International" and "Barbados".
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
We operate the website as an informative, entertaining venue aimed at our employees, customers and community. It's a very "homegrown" site and a fun project we update regfularly out of pure interest. Most of the time, that's a very positive thing, although we're admittedly not web designers. We've lost files on recent outings, forgot to upload photos to the ftp servers at times and worked through a lot of issues in maintaining it, but we keep at it and hope it's of value to the intended audience.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Our only goal is to have an easily accessible online venue where we can better interact with our staff across all stores, our local and worldwide customer base and our community.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We never approached the site from a monetary standpoint, although the original purpose was simply to showcase the stores and their locations on the island. For us, it's been a labor of love.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
If we had an unlimited budget, we'd go golfing or sailing...this is, after all, Barbados.
Do you plan to offer merchandise online thorugh the site at some point in the future?
No. Diamonds International already has an online presence with www.shopdi.com. Our much simpler site is designed to be exclusively about our stores in Barbados and how we interact within the community.
Do you get a lot of contact from the website?
We list the phone numbers for all our Barbados stores on our "contact us" page, so it likely does generate some phone traffic. We never ask callers where they heard of us so it's impossible to be certain, but we do see a lot of traffic to the site on analytics.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Probably figuring out how to design and maintain a web property, and making improvements as time goes on. As mentioned earlier, the site has been a labor of love but we're obviously not web designers. We thought about having a professional web designer help us with the site but couldn't resist getting our hands dirty learning about HTML, SEO and other aspects of site development while having fun in the process.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
I don't know that we've done a lot of promotion, but I'd have to say that Caribbean and specifically Barbados directory listings seemed to help put the site on the map. I think it helped us to become a trusted site on Google.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
For me, the expectation of time associated with creating even one webpage was way off. To the average person visiting our site, the pages look simple...and they are simple. But for the few of us who had to learn how to make even the simplest of pages from scratch, it was definitely an experience.
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 want to update it more often than we have lately but things get in the way. We've been very busy at all of our locations on the island so that takes precendence over maintaining the site. We always find the time, though, and we'll maintain it for the forseeable future and hopefully as long as we're lucky enough to be here.
Being busy at your many locations is a good thing, I take it?
You bet. We try our best to educate our customers on buying fine jewelry while offering the exceptional value and the highest level of customer service on the island. To us, every customer represents an opportunity to introduce Diamonds International and the value we offer in the marketplace. That's something we'd rather do in person than through a website.
What is your website address?
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