I have googled every search phrase I can think of and not coming up with anything. My gf has a part-time brick and mortar business (shaved ice -- snow cones) that has open hours that vary. It's a small town and we're still trying to figure out how to make this work best. (For the customers and also for her!) It might make more sense if her hours could vary even more! Whenever she is "open for business" she would like to be able to go to a site and post that she is open. How? It needs to be simple. She doesn't have a website but I could build her one if it is a must. I am no expert coder but could get it done. Is there a script for this or do you know of any simple way to do this? She could make a FB announcement like "I'm here!" but would have no idea how many people would even see it due to the FB algorithms. She could email or text a customer list but she doesn't have a list (would have to build it) and, anyway, that would be too burdensome. Idea here is that she has a number of loyal customers and these types of people, we feel that they just might check a website to see if she is open. Thinking that they would be more apt to do that rather than pick up the phone and call her just to see if she is open. PLUS, she gets uber busy with a waiting line when sales are good and she has no time to answer the phone. There might be a simpler method other than doing this via a website but I can't think of it, lol.
There are lots of easy DIY options out there now that don't require you being a "developer". Wix, Square, GoDaddy, etc. They are pretty reasonably priced to buy the domain name, build a site, and register it for search engines.
I am aware of DIY websites. I am looking for something simpler. Logging in and changing text in a certain field of a website sounds easy but I don't think she'd stick with that. Wondering if there is something like a script that could be installed on a site that would recognize her automatically, in effect, she is always logged in... upon hitting the site from her phone, click an OPEN/CLOSED button. Same thing when she closes for the day.
Is there any reason for saying Twitter instead of FB? I have zero allegiance to FB but my perception is that far more of her market is on FB than are on Twitter.
I would do a dedicated FB page too (though I hate FB!) My neighbor has a food truck and that is how he lets customers know where and when he'll be. Seems to work out well for him. Some people see the business FB page and than it spreads word of mouth (that's how I know). Just share the business FB page with all of your contacts and hace them do the same and hopefully it will take off
Yeah. You could do that. It can get fairly complex because you need to connect to a button of sorts. It would depend on the web platform. So a possible "button" could be, If: her location is at the business. Then: update status/make post/display field/send message. The only problem is that this is a custom job so you might have trouble finding something out of the box. Custom web development is sometimes prohibitively expensive. I have done a lot of development and I might be able to point help of you want to set up a call.
"Expensive" isn't in her vocabulary for this. We don't even know if her business is going to survive in this small town. She does well at events where there are lots of people mingling; it's possible she will forego day-to-day and just do events. But if she does that, she still could open in our town on various days. She could open whenever she feels like it, hence, the need for this application. The script gizmo that senses her location via her phone is a great idea except that she sometimes is at her trailer (which is what she operates out of, think food truck) doing various things and is NOT actually open, so, it needs to be something she does manually. I know that FB will work decently. I don't like FB either, but, it's ubiquitous. If this isn't something pretty simple and inexpensive, she can just announce it on FB, which is what she does at this time. I think she has a business page, I need to ask.
Worst part of the webpage idea is that people would have to actually go to the website to see if she's open for business. I think FB or Twitter would be better as they will notify "followers/customers" whenever she posts an update. I imagine a "push" could be accomplished if she got all of the customers to sign up for email alerts via the webpage. Either way, you want to be sure that she can actively notify the customers. Never allow for it to be passive on the customers end. They won't always be thinking of the product, until given that little mental nudge. Best of luck on the endeavor.
