Carolina Adirondack: Small Business Blog of the Day

What it is
Carolina Adirondack sells unique outdoor furniture from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The site features large images of the shop's products including tables and chairs. Readers are directed to order products by phone or through an order form that can be printed out and mailed.

Favorite Post
I'm pretty much choosing one at random here because there are very few posts and they are all pretty similar. Here's a description of a bench:

"It incorporates our mitered leg with rabbets (a method of construction that provides mechanical support for the frame in addition to the screws and waterproof glue used in our joinery)."

Further Comments
You might be wondering why I'm featuring a blog that is rarely updated, doesn't tell you much about the company, includes only a handful of posts, and lacks most of traditional blogging conventions.

The reason I'm featuring it is because of its simplicity. The format (it looks like Typepad) allows the company to update photos and descriptions of their products super-easily, and even allows feedback of their products through the comments.

Could the site be better? Of course. They could start writing on a weekly basis. Just one post a week about special customer requests would give this blog an entirely new dimension that would draw readers in and give readers a reason to load the blog's RSS feed into their readers. More posts would attract more links, and more links would bring better search engine results.

But still it's worth looking at just to see a nice product display format with a minimal amount of effort.

Technorati : adirondack chair, adirondack chairs, adirondack furniture, carolina adirondack

Comments

[Craig McGinty]

That is a very interesting use of TypePad to run a ecommerce store really.

Plug in a couple of Buy It Now buttons, say through PayPal and you could easily have a shop.

Anyone with a bit of techie knowledge could hack the templates to not display dates and use categories as sales pages.

I've seen others write about an ecommerce/TypePad blend, I'm sure it would prove successful.

[Brian Brown]

Yes Craig. I'll bet you've seen the posts from John at Typepad Hacks. Integrating stores into Typepad is going to be a very big deal in the next year.