Five years ago, a garden center designed its website. It was created by a freelance computer programmer, featured the store’s hours, location, and phone number. The owners haven’t updated it since. Sound familiar?

It’s time to upgrade from the basic website to a true marketing tool that can help your customers become even more engaged with your business. Here are tips from the marketing pros and some garden centers who have made the leap.

① Engage the reader to do more. First generation websites give the visitor the basics on your business. Next generation sites ask the visitor to sign up for an e-newsletter, ask a question, buy a gift card or even register for a seminar, says Kurt Fromherz of Sunrise Marketing, which builds websites for garden centers. “If you build an Ask Me function and you promote it, that technology will allow you to reach more customers and get more information to people easier, rather than waiting for them to come back into the store,” he says.

② Create a visceral reaction with photos. Knock their socks off with images. “The first thing I want to do is create a reaction in you, not a lot of text,” says Phil Adikes of website and e-newsletter vendor Garden Center News. “When you open a page, you should have this red rose that has drops of water rolling off it and it actually makes you hungry. We call it the ‘get off the sofa’ factor.” Show your customers the finished product and how beautiful landscaping can be.

The new website for Chalet, Chicago, Ill., uses beauty shots taken by staffers and stock photography from sites like iStock Photos (istockphoto.com). The site has been important for leads for large-scale home projects, according to Maggie Zielinski, communications director. The Chalet site features a landscape services photo gallery where visitors can see that department’s work. “It’s how people check out what garden centers offer, especially services and at a high margin. They’re shopping around and they’re doing it online.”

③ Update, update, update. Less sophisticated garden centers update the site when store traffic is slow, Adikes says, but they really need to update weekly during peak season. If content isn’t fresh, visitors won’t return. New content, like seasonal crop tips, also drives traffic to your site from search engines like Google.

Load up on content, says Zielinski. She says Chalet updates its site weekly with news on events and seasonal planting information. A lot of the content is written in the offseason and then rotated seasonally.

A.J. Petitti of Petitti Garden Centers in Cleveland, Ohio, says the setup of its current site allows his staff to edit about 80 percent of it without help from a programmer. The site is updated every other day, if not daily, with events, store hours, products, graphics and sales.

④ Show visitors who you are. If your customer sees you as a trusted source and member of the community, you could have a customer for life. Blogs, Twitter, video and podcasts are all ways to have a personal conversation with customers and are recommendations Fromherz gives to the most advanced garden centers.

That personal connection helps distinguish the independent garden center from the big box store. Adikes says he first used “impersonal personal facts” with Almaden Valley’s website to help visitors make a personal connection with staff. “You can’t compete with that, once we have that relationship with the customer,” he says. “It’s implicit that we have something that no one else has.”

⑤ Reevaluate your navigation. When Chalet made the decision to redesign its site, an internal committee collaborated on its new look using a wish list and a list of priorities. The redesign coincided with a rebranding of Chalet, highlighting its people and depth of experience, as well as a simultaneous ad campaign that shared the same message.

Petitti's places a similar emphasis on site design. “Make sure you think it through very, very well,” Petitti says. “Every update, everything you sign off on, there’s no ‘Oops, can we go back in and do this a little differently?’ Have a clear idea of what you want to do and what your expectations are. Do your homework. You can’t do enough preparation. Don’t try to do it in a rush. Take your time and really think through what you want to do.”

⑥ Think about staffing. Few garden centers employ a computer programmer on staff. Sunrise Marketing and Garden Center News offer site design services, while Petitti hired marketing pros DigiKnow to design his site. Some designers offer easy web interfaces so garden centers can make updates on their own, while other garden centers prefer updates be made by a programmer. A freelance programmer handles updates on the new Chalet site. Petitti’s site is maintained internally by its marketing director and graphic designer.

Weigh costs versus rewards in regard to who will update your site. Websites are an investment, but they can reap great rewards. “People get caught up in the hype and the biggest fallacy is people think it’s free – that there’s no cost and they’re going to save all this money,” Fromherz says. “Those are the same people who don’t advertise when they’re busy because they think they don’t need to.”

⑦ Think of site design as a process, not an event. “Every year, we identify something we want to improve on, what we want to make more accessible and what we want to make stand out a little more,” Petitti says. “And then we figure out what we want to spend, because every improvement we make, there’s a price tag to go along with it.” The Petitti site is run through a database, which now stores more than 60,000 items, with more to come. The behind-the-scenes architecture for e-commerce is set up in case Pettiti’s goes down that road someday.

Adikes suggests thinking of a site like a garden. Build it, but then add new content. “If you have to make too many decisions at once, they’re not all going to be good ones,” he says. "Start with something basic, but make a commitment to add three or five pages per month.

"Over time, it will grow into what you want it to be.”