When the housing market tanked late last year with the contraction of US credit markets, custom home builder Philip Ware (www.philiplanehomes.com) quickly found himself in a quandry. Still involved in day-to-day operations of his highend custom home building business just north of Houston, the slow market pushed him into another, unexpected direction.
Ware started another company based on one of his passions, devoting time, sweat and some personal savings. Texas Trikes (www.texastrikes.net) is a niche motorcyle company that converts Harley-Davidsons, Hondas, and other big bikes into shiny, powerful three-wheelers called “Trikes” in the motocycling community. From experience, Ware knew an effective business website that could be found in Google and other search engines would be an integral part of his marketing effort.
“Good business websites have helped us build clientele and attract new customers in the past and the relative cost to print advertising and other media makes it a no-brainer,” explained Ware. “People expect you to have a website today. It’s a fact of doing business. Customers are looking for my trike conversion kits and services online and I need a nice, well-thought out, informative website to bring in these prospects.”
Ware had worked with MH1 Web Design of The Woodlands, Texas on previous home building websites and marketing over the years. So, with a relatively small budget and simple plan in mind, Ware contacted MH1 owner Mike Hallaron to develop a simple, clean brochure-style website. Advanced features were not necessary and could be added down the road.
“Working with MH1 is easy because we work one-on-one and the customer service is very personal and responsive. They quickly took my concept and some initial graphics and developed a simple brochure-style website.” MH1 owner Mike Hallaron helped Ware refine keywords and create effective meta tags and text that would serve the balance between human visitors reading the site and search engine crawlers scouring the Texas Trikes content for ranking purposes. It took some hard work and late hours but the resulting site is simple to navigate, easy to read, and filled with photos of real trike samples.
“Our goal was to produce a website that ranks highly in the search engines under our desired keywords and urged visitors to call or email to learn more. If we can help generate interested leads for our web design customers than we have done our job,” said Hallaron.
The outlook for Texas Trikes is already very bright even though Ware’s hobby-turned business is only a few months old. As far as his new website goes, the proof is in the pudding.
Ware claims, “If you search for “trike conversion dealer” on Google, Yahoo, Ask, or Bing, we are the first listing to come up! I am getting sales leads from Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, Canada, Ireland, and beyond. Now I have to turn these pricing requests into sales!”
That’s what he calls results.
We are very proud to receive the following kind words from Pastor Frankie Mazzapica at Spirit Filled Celebration Church in The Woodlands. Thank you Pastor Frankie!
