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| Original Message Added : 24 Mar 2010 One of the actions on my new marketing plan is to try to improve my website www.dreamofsilver.com, in order to increase conversion rate, and I am after some feedback on the website. I have asked friends and family and they all say 'Ooh, it's lovely', as they don't want to hurt my feelings! So I wanted to ask some people who don't know me what they think of it. If you could imagine you are looking for silver jewellery to buy for yourself or a friend, and have come across my website, what would you think? Would you buy from it, and if not then why not? Any feedback or suggestions would be really welcome, and don't worry about hurting my feelings if you don't like it! Many thanks in advance. Laura xx |
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| Reply : 24 Mar 2010 - (Edited : 24 Mar 2010) On the pure aesthetics of your site - and this is always subjective - it is nice but I find it quite difficult to read and would not stay long for that reason. You did ask us to put ourselves in the mind of a prospective buyer, so don't shoot the messenger!! And, in the context of it being a jewellery site, I am also just a man!! Of much more importance is how the site is optimised and what you are doing to drive traffic. I have friends who have what most people would say were awful sites, but they are so well optimised and the people concerned so good at driving traffic, that the aesthetics are almost an incidental. Two pieces of advice for you,
You are for example showing the term "sterling jewellery" as one of the keywords you want to rank for - I checked the source code of your site - but that term does not feature anywhere when I check for what is called "keyword density". You may want to rank for something, but if it is not mentioned across your site, you will struggle, especially in such a competitive marketplace. My advice to you is to find someone whose market knowledge you trust - perhaps the person/company who created your site? - and get them to focus on having your site as best optimised as it can be for your marktplace, and then to really work on all the traffic driving methods you can. Something which is very important, and I see this with 90%+ of product sites. You must not expect them to be selling sites. You must presell people before they get to your site, and that is a whole separate issue, part of which, but only a small part, the use of aweber.com will address. I am currently offering a FREE 30 minute telephone consultancy to all FREEINDEX subscribers and would be happy to talk and advise - you can obviously get me via this site, or my own personal site www.intenetconsultantmiltonkeynes.co.uk Your site is way, way better than most I am asked to look at, but there is so much more you could be doing, and this is not the medium to try and explain that. All the best. John Patterson
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| Reply : 7 Apr 2010 I am a professional web designer but don't worry this is not a sales pitch - just general feedback and advice. Firstly your site is not terrible, far from it but there are areas you need to address - you get about 7 seconds to hook the average website visitor and then they are gone. There are cross browser compatibility problems - looks OK in internet explorer but try viewing it in Google Chrome - you will see that some elements on the home page do not align properly - this is an easy fix. This could be losing you significant sales, if visitors to my site are typical then 36% use Internet Explorer 30% use Fire fox 17% use Safari and 14% use Chrome I think your home page should showcase your products, grabbing your visitors attention with stunning images of jewellery, one of the best ways of doing this is by using a slide show or fader - I would replace your shop is closed text and the top 2 boxes with a nice image slider - rotating your best 8 images with some marketing text built in. This maximises your use of the space and gets more of your products in front of your visitors. I think the prominent position of your shop closed announcement is also a mistake - it says very loudly that you are a one person business - I would move that to the shopping cart - it is important to tell people before they order but at least let them look round before putting them off The only way of contacting you is a submission form - this is a mistake, research shows that people are more likely to trust a business that is prepared to display a trading address and phone number. In addition to this from January 2007 an update to the companies act means that all websites should display the companies registration number and trading address plus vat number if applicable. You can be fined if you don't. I would make more of your recommendations by Handbag and Marie Clare - small link on the home page to your bigger feature. In terms of conversions - I can see in your code that you have Google analytics installed - this is a great tool but too often it is just used to count how many visitors reach your site, if you dont already you should look at what your visitors do when they visit your site - what are the exit pages - is the bounce rate too high - this can give you clues as to which pages need improving - where you are losing your visitors. Google also have a new tool called Google Website optimiser - just search for it - this lets you try out different ideas and see which ones work and which ones don't - by using this and implementing some of the changes you can see if they have a positive or negative effect and adjust accordingly. Finally - your Google page rank is 2 - for an established site like yours with some quality links coming in this is lower than I would have expected, this can effect your position in search results. One possible reason for this is your links page - nothing wrong with linking to other sites but if you link to the wrong site it can negatively affect your page rank - check the page rank of any site before you link to it and avoid any site with a zero page rank. (google for page rank tools - there are loads available free) Hope this helps you - i would think that with a little effort you should be able to improve sales significantly - Good luck Nigel - 9 Dot Web Design Ltd |
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| Reply : 8 Apr 2010 Hi Laura, Completed a quick review and my observations:- 1. One key reason for poor search rankings is due to poor coding against a compliance standard such as W3C. 2. I've checked against W3C and you have a number of xhtml and css errors and you also have some broken links. All of these problems can effect the search ranking of your website If you wish to discuss further please refer to my website for contact details: www.pxwm.co.uk Regards SteveB |
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| Reply : 14 Apr 2010 Your low conversion rates are simply down to a few factors that have mainly been pointed out above, as well as a couple of others, such as:
There's actually quite a lot to be looking at and to be honest I would strongly recommend that you engage a professional web developer to help you - it could save an awful lot of time and wasted effort. You don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money getting them to do it all for you, you could simply pay for a few hours of mentoring and consultancy, whilst you do the leg work - just an idea! Good luck and don't forget to come back and tell us all how you get on. Regards, Richard |
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