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- Clare Collard 'Yum Yum Jelly'
Clare Collard
Yum Yum Jelly Ltd - Chelmsford, Essex
Yum Yum Jelly is Chelmsford’s first lifestyle store – a girly gift boutique selling clothes, jewellery, home accessories, toiletries and all manner of girly things!
The business set up in September 2004 by Clare Collard and her sister Sally Downes and consists of both a shop in Chelmsford and a website where products can be purchased online.
Clare set up the business after leaving a project management job in London to have two children. Since then Clare and Sally have won a string of awards including Chelmsford’s favourite shop, Essex Retailer of the Year and finalist in the Natwest Retailer of the Year awards.
Clare attended the ‘Enhancing your Website to Grow your Business’ workshop, run by the Centre for Women’s Enterprise for self employed women, in March 2007 after identifying a need to improve the website side of her business.
Since attending the workshop Clare has seen the traffic visiting her website double resulting in an increase in sales of more than 50%, including some overseas orders, enabling Clare and Sally to move the website side of the business to the ‘next level’.
‘Brilliant!’ was how Clare described the ‘Enhancing your Website’ workshop. ‘The workshop was not too basic and was challenging enough to cover what I needed to know.
Although the course was for everybody I was very impressed that the trainer took the time to look at our website beforehand and give personal advice on what we could improve.
It was a very professional workshop and I was also impressed at the materials given to us on the day to take away – these were invaluable when working on my website after the workshop’.
The workshop has also had a positive impact on the sales through the shop as customers are now able to use the website to view the product range before visiting the store.
As a result of the ‘Enhancing your Website’ workshop Clare has been able to:
- Incorporate keywords to increase her Google rating – Yum Yum Jelly is now frequently in the top three when searching Google.
- Ensure content is relevant to the user, incorporating feedback from the trainer.
- Improve website navigation
- Introduce a recommend a friend button.
- Introduce a newsletter for customers.
- Begin a pay per click advertising experiment.
- Begin to update news items daily on the website.
The workshop
which Clare attended was made possible thanks to funding from the European
Social Fund and the East of England Development Agency.
