Review my site please?

[klevans]

My site www.tattybear.co.uk has been up and running for a while taking orders. But we seem to get lots of hits from google but not many purchases.

I would like to hear feedback on what you think of the website, in terms of ease of use, content and functionality. Any comments will be welcome as now the site has been tweaked we still can't seem to get the orders through.

Looking forward to hearing what you think

Karen Evans

[Mike Hughes]

I've had a look and think there's plenty you can do to get those sales coming in:

1. You redirect from tattybear to creativeconnect which looks bad to visitors.

2. The redirect is a 302 redirect which google will accept but other SEs will get confused. To fix this and the above item you'll have to get your website onto your domain, which will throw your search results out for a while but you'll have to take the hit sometime and the sooner the better.

3. Your home page doesn't look very professional and the navigation menu doesn't exist. I find it confusing and the layout could be better.

4. There's little to no SE help going on. See here for a nice summary:

http://www.seekport.co.uk/seekbot/se...mit=check+site

5. Once you're into the shop I have to admit that I hate moving menus. They distract people away from what they should be looking at (your products and offers) and they just make life more difficult. For most people, if the navigation is obvious and straight forward, then they know where to find it when they need it.

6. On smaller browser windows the navigation overlaps the images.

7. Lots of sections have no-image available. Put an image up.

8. Your product images and descriptions could do with more work. Looking at the watches section I couldn't see what was on the watch face (the important bit) and a short bit of text isn't good enough. Also there's no specification for the watch. Is it quartz ? battery operated? water resistant, how accurate? etc.

9. All your titles are 'creative connexions..etc'. so what is the site called? is it 'tattybear' or 'creative connect' or 'creative connexions'.

10. Your shopping cart doesn't look the same as the rest of the site.

11. You sell helium ballons un-inflated. How are people supposed to inflate them? You should sell the helium as well or at least tell people how they're going to get them inflated.

I'm glad you're getting plenty of traffic. If you start to look at the site from a visitors perspective, fix the domain problem and sort out the search engine issues I'm sure you'll do a lot better.

Mike

[Andrew Mellor]

Looking very quickly -

1) I tried to view the site using IE 6 and screen resolution of 800x600. From our own site stats we find that this screen setting still accounts for 30%.
The floating menu that comes out from the left hand side obscures the product image and some of the details making it very difficult to see the product and to order.

2) I echo what Mike in the previous post said - the website address in the browser address bar is http://www.creativeconnect.co.uk whereas the site banner shows www.tattybear.co.uk - this confused me and made me wary.

Hope this helps

[compendia]

Hi,

Just some thoughts. You shoud probably change the font, it looked like you had times new roman which is uite difficult to read on screen. What about verdana or arial?

There were a lot of colours, using bold colours to draw attention to vital information is good but I felt a bit overloaded.

I didn't like RRP's, I think whole words are better. Quite a bit of the information seemed to be in note form.

The pictures seemed a bit greyed out.

Most importantly, and this is something nearly everyone is guilty of (I know I am), you've made a site that only means something to people who know who tatty bear is.
I don't know,
Who is Tatty bear?
Where does he come from?
How many people collect worldwide?
Why will my friend like one for Christmas?
What is the best item to begin a collection?
What are the different items made of?
Who is a typical tatty bear collector?

I think it's a good site and he is a cute character,
loads of luck
Megan

[jayemm]

as an online buyer - not a website expert - I agree with the other comments.

Please change your font to Verdana - it's so much easier to read and more pleasant to look at on a website.

On the home page you've got "May 2005 offers" underlined. This indicates that it's a link - but it isn't. Underline the links and remove underlining from words that aren't links.

Priority has to be to get rid of that moving menu. It's really irritating.

[jpungar]

I agree with what has been said already. Think you need to look at your logo as it is a bit of a non event at the mo'. Also the order of your sections seems a bit odd. Having coming soon at the top is a disapointment to customers as, the first thing they see is "no picture yet" and that they can't buy what they are looking at coz it's not in stock yet.

The pictures seem a little dull because of the fade you have put over the top of them. I don't think this quite works. I think that the colour selection is ok for the site but there is too much grey, try giving the main part a white background with grey trim. It makes things easier to read and will brighten up the site. As other people have said, change the font, it's hard to read and a bit ugly. Also try to break up your text a little. A paragraph can be one sentence, it makes it easier and more inviting to read.

Good luck with it.