site critique

[rod willis]

I have nearly completed my site and I would really apreciate some feedback from people in this community if you have a spare moment or two.

If you could pass some comments on what you like as well as what you dont like and any suggestions on improving would be greatly apreciated.

dont hold the horses on this one BE BRUTAL if you must

my site is at www.btshowroom.com

cheers

rod
www.btshowroom.com
www.btwarehouse.net

[Jan]

I don't think that you have enough product details, for example you are selling plasma TV screens for over £5000 and the only info there is about that product is JVC 50 INCH 16:9 SVGA PLASMA SCREEN, you need to add your pictures and perhaps give more information.

Also the big picture at the top of the screen moves your products off the bottom of the screen, it does look nice but makes it hard to see what you are actually selling. In the plasma tv section there is a big gap below the big picture so maybe if you got rid of that it would sort this out.

Regards,

[jont]

Very nice design concept - you certainly would not know it was an actinic driven site.

If you are not making the BT logo top left clickable as a homepage link I would be tempted to incorporate the logo into the large image and save some precious space and download time. Undecided about the navigation down the right hand side!

Would be nice to have larger images against the products and a link to a larger image with more details - as Jan suggests the info is a little on the scant side so makes comparing products down to price only unless you are familiar with each product already.

I have looked at 4 pages in different sections and it appears your keywords are the same for each and you have no description tags in there.

Hope the site does well for you.

Jont

[rod willis]

Thanks for the advice its good to get constructive critisism, most of our current clients know exactly what they are after but we recognise that we need detailed descriptions and images and we are working on it however with 4000 products this is a huge job (unless you use c net or equivelent)

I will be looking at these suggestions over the next week or two thanks again its very helpfull please keep them comming.

Cheers

Rod
www.btshowroom.com
www.btwarehouse.net

[chris ashdown]

My understanding is that you should try to get the clicks down to a maximum of three to four to find and purchase an item, otherwise you will loose many potential sales

You seem to have quite a few layers to find the goodies

Very crisp site and photo's, great work. hope you do well

[rod willis]

Good call Chris

We are taking a chance with this, we felt that the range of products was so wide they had to be broken up into sections ,sub sections and sub sub sections so to speak but we are hoping that it is so easy to navigate the site that it shouldnt be an issue but if it looks like we are losing the sales you mentioned it will be changed but we really want to avoid clutter that you see on most sites we are considering however working on a way of listing all the product categories so customers can see at a glance what they want and get to it straight away if they want to but fitting it into the feel and style of the site is not easy.

Thanks

[granthams]

Good site Rod,

I love to see people heavily modify the visual side of Actinic and you have done a great job on that. I would agree with Chris Ashdown in the fact the you appear to be clicking through many menus and submenus to find the product that you want. Why don't you include those subsections in your 'search section' dropdown and put that on every page? It may just help people to find your products quicker.

My other point is that I feel if you are going to put text on a page displaying 'view products' I strongly feel they need to be clickable links. I see you have the product names above clickable but I instantly went to click the 'view products' type but found it strange when nothing happened. I feel this problem is slightly worse on the homepage where the 'view products' text is not clickable but the tiny image next to it is. I don't want to sound picky but I don't feel the image to the left of the text is something that prompts you to click. It is more like a nice graphical bullet. I would either make that image something that represents a menu more or I would just have the text link.

I think the colour scheme is excellent and the choice of images is brilliant. With a few user improvements that is a site I would find a joy to browse.

Kind regards

Granthams

[rod willis]

Thank you for the comment, I agree with almost everything that has been mentioned and its all very helpfull and I think we will try and implement a few changes to try and make things a little easier so within a month we should be looking at a far smoother / easier site to navigate for potential customers however I have a few other issues to deal with 1st.

Thanks again everybody your comments have been really helpfull

cheers

rod
www.btshowroom.com
www.btwarehouse.net

[bekyed]

I have always worked on 3 clicks to a sale.
Any more and the customer becomes confused and leaves the site.
Adopt the KISS method (Keep It Simple And Stupid) makes sense.

Wayne.