We are so excited to share that our first client website is 

!

Lulu's Sweets Boutique is a bakery located in West Chester Township, Ohio specializing in cakes, french macarons, cupcakes, and buttercream cookies.

We initially began discussions with owner, Rosanna, during a very exciting time for her business. After nearly 5 years of successful home baking, she was about to take the leap into opening a new retail space! This new space was going to increase her and the team's capacity to bake more volume and reach new customers.

We built them a feature-rich, fully custom, Shopify store. As Shopify Partners, we were able to build complex and custom tailored integrations specifically for their unique business needs, such as pick-up order scheduling, product customization, and much more. 

Previously, all orders came in over the phone or email and would usually require multiple "back-and-forths" between her and her customers. Now what took hours, only takes minutes, optimizing operations and delivering a substantially improved customer experience.

Alongside the website, we helped them migrate Point of Sale systems to Shopify POS and seamlessly integrated the website with it. With their new website as a foundation, Lulu's now has an omni-channel e-commerce platform enabling direct selling through their social media pages like Instagram and Facebook, their Shopify POS, as well as Google, TikTok, and more - all through a single unified backend.

At the time of publishing, the site's Google Core Web Vitals scores for Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO are 98, 98, 100, and 100 respectively. Read about these scores in our 

Rosanna and her team have been a pleasure to work with, and we are honored to get to continue on this exciting journey with them. It's been a blast watching the orders roll in and seeing what customized creations their customers have been able to order using the features we built into the site.

If you are in Cincinnati and want to support a local, family business, with exceptional quality products (not just saying that), order a cake for your next special occasion through the site, and when you pick it up in-store, tell them their very cool web developers sent you! 😉

Stay tuned for future case studies and learnings.

Screenshot of new website, cake collection page

New Website: Lulu's Sweets Boutique

"75% of people base the credibility of a business on how their website looks", according to a 

Too many businesses today think they are ahead of the pack for having a website at all, regardless of how good it looks. This might have been the case 10+ years ago but definitely not anymore.

The idea of judging an entire business based on the quality of their website is not only a very real thing but a fast-growing trend, especially with younger generations.

Demonstrating to your potential customers that you care about the quality of your website shows them that you care about quality in all things you do.

It also shows your customers that you care about your brand, and for younger generations, brand image and communicating your business' story and mission are massively important.

You might have great copy text, a well-crafted call to action, and everything else done right, but if your design looks outdated or has bugs, those things are noticed by your potential customer, and their first impression of your business is not going to be satisfactory.

 for visitors to form an opinion on your website" (

Other than the design of your site, there are of course many other factors that can affect your credibility, such as:

Hopefully after reading this, you are convinced as to how important the quality of your website is to your company's overall credibility. Technology moves very fast, and the standard for what makes a good website is constantly being raised.

If your current site is more than a couple of years old or built DIY by a non-professional, consider giving it a refresh to keep up with trends.

If you aren't so sure or want an honest outside opinion, 

 today to get a free, comprehensive evaluation of your current website.

At 2 Rivers Digital, we build modern websites that both perform and look great. If you are interested in giving your web presence a serious upgrade, 

How Your Website's Quality Impacts Your Business Credibility

Everyone has surely experienced a slow website before. Yes, it is an inconvenience, but how big of a deal is it?

.

With the majority of website traffic now taking place via mobile devices, and that trend continuing to grow, website performance is more important than ever as small performance issues that go unnoticed on high-speed internet connections are amplified when a user is on a spotty mobile data connection.

In this post, we will talk about three concrete reasons why the speed of your website matters beyond just being an inconvenience to your users. We'll also be referencing some statistics from 

a study done by Google, Fifty-Five, and Deloitte

 where they analyzed the sites of 37 leading brands in both the U.S. and Europe.


1. Slow Speeds Can Crush Your Conversion Rates

Conversion rate is a crucial metric every business should know and actively monitor.

Essentially, your conversion rate is just the percentage of your website users that perform your desired action, such as buy a product, submit a lead generation form, etc. Conversion rate has a direct impact on revenue and sales. 

"Decreasing mobile site load time by one-tenth of a second resulted in an 8.4% increase in conversion rates for retail sites" 

"Decreasing load time by 0.1s led to the bounce rate of lead generation pages improving by 8.3%." 

"When load time was decreased by 0.1s, retail customer engagement increased by 5.2%" 

For context, a blink of an eye is anywhere between 0.1s to 0.2s on average.


2. High Mobile Performance Helps Organic Traffic

Google uses many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors to determine how to rank a certain website on a search result page relative to other sites. They have been using page speed performance as a ranking factor since 2010, and in recent years, they have only been increasing the importance of speed within SEO.

To put it another way, a slow website can hurt your Google rankings. Lower Google search ranking means less traffic to your website and ultimately fewer conversions.

3. Good User Experience Leads To Customer Loyalty

"Around 70% of people say that the speed of a page affects their willingness to buy from an online retailer." 

Users remember when they had a smooth experience on a site that satisfied their needs. Even more so, users remember when they had a frustrating user experience. Nothing is worse than sitting around waiting for each page to load slowly in between each step. A slow website is also one of many factors that can hurt your entire business' 

Give your users what they are looking for in a modern user experience and enjoy the benefits of customer loyalty.

In conclusion, hopefully you can see why having not just a fast-enough site but a fast-as-possible site is crucial to success.

At 2 Rivers Digital, we build blazing fast sites using the latest and greatest tools, languages, and frameworks to adhere to all of today's best practices.

At the time of publishing this post, via 

's speed test tool, 2riversdigital.com has a load time of 248ms - which is 

10 to 20 times faster than other local web development agencies' sites in our area

If you are shopping around for a web development service provider, make sure you verify that they can walk the walk when it comes to site performance and check their scores with tools like the one mentioned above.

If you're ready to learn more about building a modern, performant site, 

3 Huge Reasons Why Website Speed Matters in 2022 (With Statistics)

Thanks for visiting our new site and checking out our blog. Here you can expect posts regarding website tips and insights, relevant educational content, as well as company updates like this one.

I wanted to start this company because I felt there was an opportunity to offer premium, modern digital services to small and medium-sized businesses in the Cincinnati region and beyond.

There are plenty of options out there to get a website up and running nowadays, either via DIY tools or other web agencies.

DIY tools, though they might be good enough for some small businesses, give the illusion of value because they are cheap and easy to get up and running, but at the end of the day, you have to invest a significant amount of your own time into building and maintaining your site, staying on top of trends, integrations, etc, taking time and attention away from your core business. The end results are often buggy, unmaintained, difficult to scale, and feature-lacking websites.

The vast majority of other web agencies have not updated their tools and processes with the times. They mostly still use WordPress and cookie-cutter templates, and the end results often lack originality and a modern user experience.

WordPress and the mentioned DIY methods above might be cheap and easy, but we are firm believers that 

. Instead, we use the latest and greatest tools available to build truly custom sites from scratch adhering to the current best practices.

Additionally, I was surprised to learn many local businesses and entities were paying top dollar for custom sites that they don't even completely own once they are built. This is concerning. We build sites that become assets to your business and you 100% own.

Lastly, we strongly believe that 

is essential for a good business website. Therefore, we have made investments in offering photography services in-house. We have our license from the FAA to operate drones for commercial use, giving us the ability to capture incredible aerial photos and video.

We look forward to getting to know our small business community in the Cincinnati region and beyond. Please feel free to reach out via our 

. 

Stay tuned for future updates and educational content!

"We're Open" sign in window of storefront

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