Field Of Dreams ....

Where do we begin?  

Nearly a year trading online and what a roller coaster of a year it has been. A quip between siblings after a few drinks at a family wedding which has snow balled into an idea, then an actual business plan and then an actual business.

               Our Cousin Ro's Wedding Where The Idea Was Born After A Few Shandies.

An ironmonger, an accountant, an app developer and biologist all in the one family. A perfect team to start an online family business. 

The ironmonger to source the products, the app developer to build the site, the accountant to look after the books and the biologist to ........ well you get the picture. The consensus from the beginning was, how "hard can it be?". Get a nice looking site, with a decent product, a snappy name and the orders will flow !! "Build it and they will come" as Kevin Costner once said.

                                                                            Great Film !!

But the reality is quite different. Firstly building a nice looking site is not as easy as the website builder would have you believe. Who would have thought that you would be waking up in the middle of the night thinking about fonts? Then there's colour schemes, layouts, finding good quality images. Then there's the issue of products and filling the site out. That's before a multitude of other things are even considered including the name!!

All the experts say that you have to say what you do in the name. weselldoorhandles.ie wasn't quite as catchy a number as we would have liked. After numerous different efforts thrown into the ring, we arrived at handleit.ie. Short snappy and had the product in the name. Well done to the accountant, not just there to count the beans!! Building your site is only the beginning and unfortunately for any online company Kevin Costner's words do not quite ring true. Traffic and getting it to your site is the holy grail. SEO. Search Engine Optimization is what it really is all about. So that's where we are at. And its a constant with any online company, the need for visibility online.

Coming up to the end of the first year we think we have done OK. We have a good looking user friendly website and what we think is a good brand. The product range is excellent with quality being the goal throughout. We sell only known brands such as Carlisle Brass, Union, Saheco, Samuel Heath, Manital among others. Our ethos is on service and we try to give a personal touch that only a family business can provide. The constant want to improve and evolve is what drives us on. And with hard work that can be achieved.

So maybe Kevin Costner should have said:

" Build it, and with a lot of hard work and graft, they will come "

Stephen, Kevin, Linda, Edel

handleit.ie

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