Name of your website?Fir Tree Grooming Academy - Dog Grooming School
Your name?
Amanda Bryan
Your Location (city, etc)
Manchester
When did you start your website and why?
We only recently started a web site for our dog grooming training business. This was in response to feedback from our students who had searched for grooming training information on the web and were telling us that the resources were quite restricted and mainly located too far away from their home addresses.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
We run a training school in Manchester for students who wish to learn how to groom and style all breeds of dogs. Our vast experience in the dog grooming trade as well as our business experience and involvements with other 'dog related' things (boarding kennels, dog showing, etc.) has given us an excellent grounding for our grooming school, which was opened about three years ago. Before opening the school, all of our tutors underwent a City and Guilds Teaching Certification Course - so that we were not only able to posses the required qualifications and experience in dog grooming, we were also able to impart that knowledge correctly, in a manner that the students were able to understand and learn from.
We have a strong belief in hands-on training, so our students are introduced to dogs that require grooming from their first day at the course. Throughout our course, each student can expect to work on at least ten dogs each week – with an increasing involvement in the whole process of grooming the dog. We use a wide variety of breeds and the students are taught the correct trimming and styling techniques specific to each breed. Much of the study work and the theory is given as work to be undertaken outside our ‘classroom’ hours, so the students gain the greater benefit of hands-on grooming tuition for the maximum amount of time on each course.
Our policy of “one size doesn’t fit all” is of great benefit to many of our students. We take a small number of students on to each course that we run (a maximum of four at any one time). This gives us the ability to mould the course content to the student’s requirements and the options to add or remove items from our syllabus to give the optimum content for each individual. Our student-teacher ratio is excellent, often allowing one-to-one training on many occasions - and never greater than two-to-one on any day throughout the course.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
Convincing one of the tutor’s partners, who has experience in producing and maintaining web sites that he “wants” this on-going commitment to build, host and maintain our site!!
What has been the easiest part of operating your website?
Everything after achieving the above! :-)
What was your biggest mistake?
Our biggest mistake probably was overlooking the benefits of having a web site to pass on information to people who are considering entering the dog grooming business. With our web site we are able to pass on a wide range of information about our dog grooming courses and about the business in general.
Tell us how your business has benefited from your website?
Anyone enquiring about our training courses via the web site now has some background information about the dog grooming business and our course content. This saves both the enquirer and us the time of explaining much of the details that they need.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
The search engines are a necessary guide for people by indexing the internet. Although they claim to be driven by quality of content, it is frustrating when you see less relevant sites or less informative sites being returned in search results ahead of sites of much better quality. I believe they rely too heavily on the scoring from ‘inbound links’ and we still have the position, many years down the line of the internet’s maturity, where the clever web site optimisers steal positions over the genuine and informative sites that are out there - Google being the biggest culprit!
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
We believe that carefully selected and relevant links to and from our site and submission to relevant directory sites are the best internet promotion for us. This is definitely a case, for us, of the quality of links and not the quantity of links.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
Direct submission of the web site details to the major search engines. It is not necessary and it takes them far too long to index your site. It’s better to get on with the site building and optimising and leave the search engine spiders to find the site for themselves, normally by the links from other web sites.
Where do you see your business developing in the future?
We are installing upgraded equipment for our teaching facility and considering new premises in the near future. If present student enquiries and course bookings remain stable, we will consider a further training facility located in the North West of the UK.
What is your website address?
Fir Tree Grooming Academy - Dog Grooming School
