14-Sep-2016

Natural Beauty Group

A new site for a new range of make up and skin care made from natural ingredients.

Home page with scrolling background.

The Natural Beauty Group website used colourful images and a background to make it appealing to potential customers. The background is a stock photo, and the photo of the flowers was taken by the client's spouse.

There are many colours of eye shadow available, and these were presented in an oval format. I think the circle I first did looked better, but the client is always right!

View the current website.

Aquamarine, one of the many colours available.

The Website Photos

Epilogue

Sometime in February 2017 the site was handed over to an online SEO specialist to reinvigorate sales.

Notable additions are a logo (possibly done by the same people), a slide show and putting the services on the front page, which is an innovative idea as users often don't dig deep enough on your site to get to the most important thing, your services. I was setting it up to the owner's instructions and a slide show was not wanted, but they can be good to attract attention and sell your products.

When I built the site, the emphasis was to be the natural ingredients which is why they are on the front, but it would have been better to put them on the About Us page.

Checking the back-end sales have gone nowhere; so the revamp has made no improvement for selling it seems.

New free lifetime hosting, too good to be true?

In late 2018 the owner couldn't resist the offer of free lifetime hosting with Rope Digital.  I suspect they will hit the owner with some charges somewhere, as free lifetime hosting must be too good to be true, and any business must make money to at least pay for expenses.

Now that they have gone past the promotional stage the charges are quite high for a hosting service that is relatively slow. I prefer to use Ventra IP and SiteGround which provide a fast service for less than what Rope Digital charge.

Rope Digital first came out as new design house, but their website was a straight template and all the portfolio pieces are simply various templates that you can get, for example, a restaurant theme. They are not real businesses. To go with the fake "clients" are fake testimonials; if you read them, they are compliments about the templates shown and not Rope Digital's design skills! Wisely, they have focussed on web hosting, which is probably more lucrative and easier to do.

Rope Digital becomes Ground Zero

Early 2021 Rope Digital closed down and reincarnated itself into Ground Zero Digital. I thought that the business had been sold but the mobile phone number is the same which suggests that it's owned by the same person. Hosting is no longer offered. The sample projects look good and seem to be real clients.

Burn City Studio. A modern dark design.

The first one, Burn City Studio, looks very sharp and it gets its message across well. The remaining two are Google SEO improvement jobs. I wonder what has happened to the clients who got free hosting at the start when it was Rope Digital. When businesses change names you've got to ask if they have anything to hide.

3 comments on “Natural Beauty Group”

  1. Hi Glenn,

    I run Rope Digital, and I have worked very closely with Deb since she decided to shift her hosting over to me. I don't appreciate the comments you have made here about me or my site, and I would appreciate if would please re-evaluate the things you have said or consider removing your comments all together.

    This customer, along with several others were offered free lifetime hosting as an initiate when I launched the business, so no it's not too good to be true.

    1. Sorry you don't like my comments but they were true at the time.

      Anyway, here's an update of sorts...
      Rope Digital appears to have moved away from design and just offers hosting. It's not cheap starting at $15 pcm for one website. Maybe it's an alternative to WP Engine but judging by how slow Rope Digital's own website loads at I'm not sure it would be as fast. Would be interesting to compare the load time of a typical WP Engine website to one of Rope Digital's.

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