If you run a cheese business, there is a good chance your website needs to do quite a lot. It might need to sell cheese online, explain delivery, help people find your shop, show where your cheeses are stocked, promote tastings, collect email addresses, publish recipes, answer trade enquiries or help customers work out what to buy.
None of those things is particularly unusual. In fact, that is partly the point. A cheesemaker in Somerset and a cheesemaker in Yorkshire may have completely different cheeses, stories, customers and brands. Two cheesemongers might have very different shops, ranges and personalities. But underneath all of that, their websites may be trying to solve many of the same problems.
At the moment, we mostly solve those problems separately.
Starting from scratch gets expensive
Imagine you want to add a stockist finder to your website. You find a plugin, pay for it, configure it, work out how to make it fit your site and perhaps pay somebody to help when it doesn’t quite do what you need.
Somewhere else, another cheesemaker is probably doing much the same thing. The same applies to recipes, events, job listings, product filters, FAQs, email sign-ups, delivery information and dozens of other bits of website functionality.
Then there are the bigger questions. What should a good cheese product page contain? How should you explain chilled delivery? What makes a useful trade page? How should a cheesemonger’s homepage balance the shop, online ordering, events, gifting and seasonal promotions? What information does someone need before they feel confident ordering cheese online?
Again, these aren’t problems faced by just one business. So we’ve started wondering whether there is a better way to tackle some of them.
What if we solved more of the common bits together?
The idea is not to create one website and give everybody a copy. That would miss one of the most important things about independent cheese businesses.
Your brand should still be yours. Your photography, products, people, stories, tone of voice, local knowledge and customer experience should all feel like you. The question is whether every business really needs to start with a blank screen underneath all of that.
There may be an opportunity to create better shared foundations for cheese websites, with useful patterns, tools and technology that can be reused and improved rather than repeatedly rebuilt.
The principle is simple: shared foundations, individual websites.
Some of this doesn’t need any technology at all
Before anyone starts building themes or plugins, there is a simpler opportunity. We can get better at sharing what a useful cheese website actually looks like.
For example, we could develop practical page patterns for things such as:
- Cheese product pages
- Delivery and chilled shipping
- Cheesemonger homepages
- Cheesemaker homepages
- Stockist pages
- Trade and wholesale enquiries
- Cheeseboards and gifts
- Events and tastings
- Christmas ordering
- Recipes
- Contact and visit information
- Job vacancies
A good page pattern wouldn’t dictate what the finished page looks like. Instead, it could explain what the page needs to achieve, what the customer needs to know, which questions it should answer, what information builds confidence, what the main next step should be and what content is useful but often forgotten.
It could also help businesses think about what happens after the page is published. What should you measure? What questions are customers still asking? Where are people dropping out? What could be made clearer next time?
That could help somebody improving their own WordPress site just as much as somebody briefing an agency to build a completely new website.
Then there are the tools we all keep buying
This is where it gets particularly interesting. Lots of websites rely on paid plugins or extra services for fairly common jobs, including:
- Recipes
- Job listings
- Stockist finders
- Events
- Forms
- Search and filtering
- Testimonials
- FAQs
- Email integrations
- Ecommerce improvements
Individually, each cost might be perfectly reasonable. Commercial software also often solves a problem far better than something we could sensibly build ourselves, so the aim shouldn’t be to replace good tools simply for the sake of it.
But there are situations where ten, twenty or fifty businesses could all be paying separately to solve essentially the same simple problem. Could some of those tools instead be developed once and made available across The Cheese Network?
Possibly, and we are already starting to explore ideas that could eventually contribute to this. A recipe tool developed around the needs of cheese businesses could help members publish better recipe content. A jobs tool could allow businesses to publish vacancies on their own sites while also helping those vacancies reach a wider cheese jobs audience.
Over time, individual pieces like these could start becoming part of a much more useful shared website toolkit.
Better websites don’t necessarily mean new websites
There is another part of this idea that matters. The answer shouldn’t always be to rebuild your website.
Many cheese businesses already have perfectly serviceable sites. They may just have a homepage that needs improving, a confusing delivery page, product pages that don’t answer enough questions or an important customer journey that has grown messy over time.
Shared website guidance could help businesses improve those things gradually. You might start by improving the delivery page this month, then look at product pages, event promotion or the way you collect email addresses.
Small improvements can add up, and they are often much easier to manage than a complete rebuild. If we learn something useful from one business, we can also turn that learning into a checklist, template, page pattern or tool that helps the next one.
That is much more useful than repeatedly keeping good ideas and useful lessons locked inside individual website projects.
There are some particularly cheese-shaped problems
Generic website platforms can do a lot, but cheese businesses have some needs that come up again and again. Selling cheese by variable weight is an obvious example, but there are plenty of others.
Common challenges can include:
- Chilled delivery and collection
- Christmas pre-orders
- Hampers and cheeseboards
- Subscriptions
- Gift messages
- Stockist information
- Tastings and events
- Trade enquiries
- Product filtering
- Cheese care and storage information
- Delivery cut-off dates
- Local delivery
- Corporate gifting
Customers may also want to browse by milk type, style, maker, region, strength or occasion. Cheesemakers might need to balance direct-to-consumer sales with wholesale, food service and stockist information, while cheesemongers might need to balance ecommerce with encouraging people through the shop door.
These aren’t impossible problems. They are simply recurring ones, and that makes them good candidates for shared learning and, where it makes sense, shared tools.
The bit we don’t know yet
We don’t want to sit in a room and decide what cheese businesses need from their websites. We’d rather find out from the people actually running them, improving them and dealing with the frustrations day to day.
Before this idea goes much further, there are a few things we’d really like to understand:
- What is your current website built on?
- Which parts are easy for you to manage?
- Which bits regularly require outside help?
- What plugins or services do you pay for?
- What have you wanted to add but decided was too expensive or complicated?
- What frustrates you about selling cheese online?
- Which pages seem to work particularly well for you?
- Which part of your website would you improve first if somebody made it easier?
The answers will obviously vary from business to business, and that is useful in itself. But if the same problems, costs and frustrations keep appearing across different cheesemakers and cheesemongers, that is where things start to get interesting.
Could we build better cheese websites together?
This is still an idea we are exploring, and it could take a number of different directions. It might lead to shared page patterns, practical website playbooks, templates, a library of useful WordPress plugins or, eventually, a reusable website foundation designed around the needs of cheesemakers and cheesemongers.
It may also turn out that some parts of the idea are much more valuable than others. We might discover that page guidance creates more immediate value than technology, or that one particular shared tool solves a problem for a large number of businesses.
That is exactly why we want to start the conversation before we start building too much.
The question we’re interested in is simple: if cheese businesses are repeatedly solving the same website problems, which of those problems could we solve better together?
If you’ve got a website frustration, an expensive plugin you can’t live without, a feature you’ve never quite managed to implement, or something on your website that works brilliantly and others could learn from, we’d love to hear about it. It might help shape what we build next.
