Name of your website?The Princess Dress.com
Your name?
Trevor
Your Location (city, etc)
Millville (in northern Utah)
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We provide a variety of specialty dresses for princesses. While shopping at our local stores, we had a hard time finding a good variety of quality dresses for our girls. We decided it would be a nice thing to put together and let people have a good place to go to find dress up costumes for their girls.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Rather than provide a local retail location and have a high overhead, we decided to go with online sales instead. This makes it so we can keep our prices lower than our competitors.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
The first website that I personally ever launched was a site dedicated to a 1973 VW Thing that I was restoring back in about 2001. I've been putting them together ever since.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Good names for sites are getting pretty scarce out there. We selected ThePrincessDress.com because it was pretty descriptive of what were trying to sell, easy to remember, and available as a .com
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
I have not found another company out there that carries the same line of dresses as us with prices as low as ours... even when they have theirs on sale. We intend to keep it that way.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
To provide an even larger variety of dresses and keep the business for income.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We have just launched... so it's hard to project that at this point. We hope it will be good!
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
So far, this has not been a problem. Shortly, we will be adding an online tracking area so our customers can see where their shipment is in route to them. We also hope to add an interactive area where customers can share Tea Party and Fancy Nancy party ideas with each other... and provide some free party tips and fun things to do.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
We will order more product. The biggest potential problem if it goes really big really fast is storage space. That's a problem that we are prepared to deal with if it comes our way.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
While setting up our payment gateway, we had troubles using their development area to do as much testing as we would have liked. We have overcome that now and are ready to go!
What has been your biggest challenge?
Mostly waiting. Getting ready to start up a business takes time, and you have to wait for everything to happen in order for it to work properly.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Word of mouth so far, but we hope that changes soon.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It hasn't differed much. I had planned to implement more Flash in the site, but that will have to wait for a future date. The neatest thing about this is that we specifically designed the site to be simple and easy to navigate. This way, any little girl that wants to can click through our site, not get stuck, and find the dress she's always wanted. After launching, we did some testing with a 3 year old little girl who, we are told, is constantly wanting to get on the internet to look at the princess dresses. It only required very minimal instructions to get her to understand what to do, and now she can navigate the whole site (besides the payment part) on her own.
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?
The site has been officially launched for about a month now. We will keep it up for at least 2 years while we try and build a solid customer base. At this point, we do not plan to close our doors anytime soon.
Do you have any future websites that you plan on opening?
Yes, we now plan to start developing a site selling replacement infant car seat covers. Check back later for more details!
What is your website address?
The Princess Dress.com
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