Website Review

[charlotteNatrls]

Hi,

We recently had our website designed by a web company and use Actinic Business v7. We think the website looks ok but would like an independent critique from the experienced users on this forum.

We would also like to improve our sales but are unsure how to do this? Could the design be improved?

Our site can be found at http://www.charlottenaturals.co.uk

Thanks in advance

J

[Mike Hughes]

I'd certainly be happy if my site looked this good. It's fast, easy on the eye, well structured, easy to use, informative and has lots of advanced functionality (like the more info and buy button in the pop-up).

There are maybe two things I would consider changing/doing.

1. All the navigation links go via the cgi-bin and that isn't great for the search engines.

2. I thought some essential information was missing on certain products. for example I could see how many tablets there might be in a box but there's nothing to say how many to take at one time and therefor whether I'd be getting 3 months or one months supply for my money.

I see you've been open for 6 months now. Has business picked up over time and if it's a bit slow have you any ideas of how many visitors you're getting and your sales conversion rate? An often quoted figure of 2% of visitors buying is very generic but a good starting place for comparison anyway.

Mike

[george]

That is one very nice looking website. Loads of access to information, bright, I like the homepage of this site a lot.

I like how the checkout and view basket buttons are incorparated in the shopping basket box. Wonder if thats hard to do?

Top marks from me!

[B_Online]

What a beautiful site, very well done…well I’m only being picky now but when you click on ‘Shop’ the list of products does not look as good as the rest of the site.

When you click on a product and the pop up window opens, on some products you need to scroll down to read or see the add to cart button…there is a bit of script in these forums that would auto expand the pop up window to fit the full info.

I also noticed that you use quite general keywords in your title i.e. ‘Mens Health: General Health & Well being’ I think you could use more specific words more related to the products on each page…the words you use are far more competitive and you stand less chance of being found.

Julie if you ask nicely I’m sure you would get George to buy something from your site…
I just thought I would get my 2 pence worth in before Jont and Jo comment, they don’t miss a trick!

Very nice site!

Hope that helps

[george]

There was a question within these forums recently which asked if a 'site `homepage` was better, or just better with the shop index as the homepage. I think this site demonstrates the former option very, very well.

Search box on homepage too.

Yes, page titles could be improved using more specific wording, not difficult to adjust/improve though.

Health Products? Me?

[fergusw]

The other feature that has been discussed on other threads is that this site has been built in CSS rather than the old restrictive HTML table tags.
This is the way forward for site design, in my opinion, and this site shows an excellent representation of a tablular layout conversion to CSS layout.
CSS will enable designers to realise new and exciting layouts and I for one will be actively developing actinic designs in this direction.
I have visited this site before and admired the design, however today I noticed there is an issue on the site with the cgi-bin navigation returning 404's. I'm hoping this is temporary.

[pinbrook]

Well, I just have to rise to the challenge....

however the scripts aren't running at present so i'll come back later

[charlotteNatrls]

Thank you so much for your comments, they are all very constructive and we appreciate them very much.

We updated our product list at around 11:40am today, unfortunately just as Jo and Fergus checked the site.

It's back up now though. Bad timing on our part. We usually time updates early in the morning but we have an ad coming out in the paper tomorrow so decided to get our updates done today.

Thanks again for your very constructive comments, we will be reviewing our meta keywords and descriptions this afternoon. We'll pass John's suggestion of a resizable popup to our developer.

To answer your question Mike our conversion rate is, as suggested, around 2-3% of visitors.

Thanks again!

J

[B_Online]

One other thing I noticed was all your images are small, and images speak a thousand words especially when selling on the net, you don’t want to put off customers just because they couldn’t see what they are buying.
When buying from a shop, customers would probably pick up several items before choosing the one they want, part of the reason for picking a product up would be because it looked good or stood out, on the net they don’t have that luxury, people want to see the style, shape, size, colour just to see if it suites them.

Could this be added to the pop up window, you could make the image clickable to show a larger image maybe?

[scoobydoo]

I would just recommend increasing the image size when a user clicks on a product. At the moment you have the sizes set at 75 x 100 pixels, either double it or even treble the size so your customers can see what they are buying.

The only other thing I would do is in the index: Highlight main catergories in one colour then subs in a different colour.

i.e.

Mens Health
- Energy & Vitality
- General
- Grooming
- Prostate
- Condoms

Hope this helps.

Regards

Dave

[charlotteNatrls]

Hi,

Thanks again for your kind comments. We've contacted our developer and they say that the menu with CGI bin links comes from a javascript file and that with javascript turned off, which search engines can't see, there is a non cgi menu?

We have taken on board the image size comments and are currently increasing the sizes on pop-up pages that should re-size automatically.

Thanks again!



J

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks again for your kind comments. We've contacted our developer and they say that the menu with CGI bin links comes from a javascript file and that with javascript turned off, which search engines can't see, there is a non cgi menu?

How about that, they're right!

Although Google only picks up the top level sections, i.e. 'mens health', but not 'energy & viatlity', etc.

If this is standard actinic behaviour then it's better behaved than I've been giving them credit for. Although having said that, I'd still like to see the nav menu avoid the cgi-bin for sites where accounts aren't used. It's cleaner and better for the search engines and will help as they get better at reading javascript.

Mike

[chivalry21]

Mike,

This isn't standard/built-in Actinic behaviour however it is simple to implement. Look for the line below:

<script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript">
	document.write(YahooSections(section_tree))
</script>

Change it to:

<script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript">
document.write(YahooSections(section_tree))
</script>
<noscript>
NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONSTOP
</noscript>

Andy

[charlotteNatrls]

Hi,

We've had our website re-designed. It still uses Actinic v7 and we're looking for some independent feedback. If you have a few moments and wouldn't mind giving us some constructive feedback point your browser at http://www.charlottenaturals.co.uk and let us know what you think.

Many Thanks!

[RuralWeb]

It still uses Actinic v7

Im sorry for you as IMO that is a huge mistake - V9 is leaps and bounds ahead of V7 which is now unsupported and 6 years out of date.