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**pinbrook** · 18-Oct-2005, 11:46 AM

having taken a brief look at your site I feel it would do far better if you turned it into more of a community site, ie add loads of extra info pages to provide a better experience. in the trade this is known as sticky content.

thus you will draw more people to the site who simply just enjoy things like harry Potter or stars wars, and you may pick up more spontaneous sales

the current site doesn't do anything for me re the experience - often a sucessful site will have its design in keeping with the products it sells. Yours isn't.

**Legends** · 18-Oct-2005, 01:11 PM

Thanks for your coments Jo

I will definitely be adding more movie related content/reviews and such and take your point about a community type site - good food for thought there.

Struggling with ideas for design as its not my forte and apart from tinkering and adding to the basic actinic templates i am pretty much stuck with the site at the moment. - I do think your right - I do need to look at ways to theme the site to give more appeal to the movie buff. Again some food for thought.

Any other input would be most welcome

Thanks

**sihoward** · 18-Oct-2005, 01:25 PM

Ian, a few quick comments:

selling autographs and related stuff you need to establish credibility swiftly;

update logo and include eg 'selling on the net since xx - over 5,000 products sold'. current logo is not too bad but quality of the actual graphic is low - use gif for non photo graphics. Maybe add a tagline - eg: "Authentic signed movie and sports memorbillia"

Use the logo/colours to ensure the brand is carried through the site/invoice/packing etc.

'our top five' - change font to match rest of site - use colour or bold to differentiate - serif (with lines) fonts are not the best for screen - stick with arial or verdana. I would change all text to a darker colour.

expand UACC, IADA info - more credibility

Harry Potter Autograp[hs - section mis spelling, James Garner - autograph spelt wrong....take time and check every full stop, capital letter etc.

how 'bout some satisfied customer feedback

now check what you're competitors are doing....

good luck

Si
www.tool-shop.co.uk

**Legends** · 18-Oct-2005, 01:50 PM

Thanks for your comments Si

Spellings corrected - wouldn't it be nice if there was a speel checker on Actinic?

Establishing credibility is always difficult in this sceptical world - particularly when you only have a few seconds to do so and we find it really difficult to do this on the front pages.

We do have pages talking about authenticity etc and pictures of us with celebrities like Johnny Depp and Pierce Brosnan etc. But this information has to be looked for on our site - might look at ways of making it easy to find.

Like your ideas on Logo etc and will look at that over the next few days see if I can polish it up a bit.

Thanks again for your comments - all views welcome.

Cheers

**Luddite** · 18-Oct-2005, 01:52 PM

Quite small changes could make a huge difference to your homepage, such as a decent banner across the top (its a bit disjointed at the mo - nothing abit of photoshop couldn't sort). Also getting some film branding onto your homepage. To me, the page that you get to when you click 'online store' from the homepage, looks like a better page to enter the site on as its got various film branding etc on it. Film companies spend millions making their brand recognisable and alluring, so maybe it makes sense for your punters to see them as they hit your homepage, rather than 1 click in.

The feedback we've had on our site is always about our homepage - it seems that even though thats the page people spend the least amount of time on, its the page that we are remembered for.

Also - we've just started dabbling in putting html in fragments so that we can move away from some of the standard actinic formats, to give us abit more freedom. I'm not a programmer - I just mess about in dreamweaver then cut and paste it into a fragment to see what happens. Trial and error, then post on the forum when I get stuck.

Hope that helps in some way.

Nick - www.theperfectpad.co.uk

**jont** · 18-Oct-2005, 02:05 PM

Hi Ian,

conversion rates will depend on several factors, including ....

1. can people find what they are looking for
2. people are only after info and not to buy
3. prices
4. trust in product

People are obviously finding your site in the first place and navigation seems to be OK when I surfed around. Do your site stats let you know where people are going to through the site or how long they stay on the site? The vast number of visitors will stay for less than 30 seconds so grabbing attention is very important to make them stay.

Adding info as per Jo's suggestin will help in making the sale for sure.

Prices are a tricky area. Your products seem to be very high quality and priced accordingly... even if you are the cheapest like-for-like they are still high prices and will deter some of the younger fans or people looking for stocking filler gifts. Do you have a range of more economical items you could list without deterring from your quality of product and service?

With so many stories of forged signatures I imagine a lot of people will be wary of buying signed pictures and items. You have a link through to the authenticity page but it is quite off putting with a long page of text - few will take the time to read all that. May be worth adding in some images of the real thing and the forgery, tips to spotting a fake etc.

I would move the win a free MP3 player up the screen. This is a very big incentive to buy and sometimes with a 1 product per section it is off screen and needs a scroll... which people may not do and see... get this featured on the homepage also.

On the female celeb page you feature a pic of Sandra Bullock amongst others but nothing is available by her ... not a major issue but a slight irritation if someone was looking for a Sandra Bullock item.

On the whole the site works quite well and you seem to have taken a lot of the ideas from the forum on board already especially the 1 product per section and most products have lots of info.

HTH

**george** · 18-Oct-2005, 02:31 PM

Been thinking about this one Ian. How's this sound? I'm wondering if a black background would suit the product theme a bit better? ie cinema, dark, etc? Maybe the logo is crying out to be designed in `film cell strip stylee`? Maybe the side boxes could be mod'ed into stip cell's too?

Slightly off-topic. We've supplied a football shirt thats been used in Corrie, and, more famously have supplied a shipment of France football scarves to MGM Studios in New York, for the forthcoming Pink Panther 2 movie. Football Heaven, suppliers to the Stars.

I've been saving that info for ages, lol.

**Legends** · 18-Oct-2005, 02:32 PM

Hi Jont

Thanks for the comments.

On the issue of authenticity, we try to provide the punter with as much information as possible to try to educate them in the pitfalls of buying signed items and our authenticity statement is as brief as we can make it without missing out some key points. But i do take your point that probably most people would loose interest after a few paragraphs.

We also include this info in our main autograph section Autograph Information This is obviously easier to read, has pictures but does not contain as much information as our authenticity link on the home page.

The other problem - this info page is not easy to find!

Hi Nick

Thanks for your comments - for sure the Logo will be looked at over the next few days and I take your point that the first page of the shop is a better front page than the existing - so that will also get looked at.

All these jobs to do - good job its a bit quiet.

Thanks for your comments guys - keep 'em coming I'm enjoying it in a strange sort of way!!

Cheers

**Legends** · 18-Oct-2005, 02:38 PM

Hi George

Fame at last! Corrie - wow!!

Your film strips idea is a good one - bit beyond my capabilities I think - but certainly will bear in mind as a design for a new template if we go that route.

Cheers - I shall look for your scarves in the PP2 movie and tell everyone where they come from.

**jont** · 18-Oct-2005, 03:30 PM

Ian - regarding the movie strips as suggested by George.

In your Act_primary template the boxes are styled using a class "thinRED" .. or something similar (not at an Actinic PC at the moment) ... change the class to something like "moviecell"

In the actinic.css create a new selector at the bottom as follows:

.moviecell {
background-image:url(moviestrip.gif) repeat-y top;
padding: 5px;
}

the moviestrip.gif would be an image of a filmstrip (holes running vertically) ... all you would need is 1 hole either side and half the space between the next hole above and beneath as it will replicate itself down the table to look like 1 continuous strip of film .... the padding would need to be adjusted so the text does not sit over the black edge of the film strip.

Food for thought if you go down that route in the future.

**Legends** · 18-Oct-2005, 03:56 PM

Thanks Jont

i certainly will have a dabble with that to see what I can do.

Cheers

**buspassjohn** · 18-Oct-2005, 07:32 PM

With all due respect Ian, I think that the site is a great home made design, that is the problem, it is home made regardless of the effort.
If I was in your position, I would make the investment, get a professional to re-design the site and concentrate on the merchandise sourcing and pricing.
Take a look at our new site, you can see the designer at the bottom, by the way your margin on the swords is a bit cheeky!

**Legends** · 19-Oct-2005, 07:38 AM

Hi John

Yes - I like your site and I can see that the re-design should improve your conversion rates.

I am looking to budget for a makeover or full blown re-design, but at the moment I want to do as much as I can to improve what I have before going for the big change in the spring of next year (quiet time, but not that you would notice at the moment).

Basically I need to try to improve the conversion rates of our site to

a) provide funds for the investment early next year (the more I increase the sales of the site - the bigger the investment) and

b) To be able to justify the investment in the first place.

I know that it is a chicken and egg situation - but we are a small company and I need to prove that making the right small changes will result in a tangible increase in conversion rates so that I can then prove that making the big change will have the desired effect, before we invest our hard earned.

Hope this all makes sense and thanks all for your contributions - all ideas gratefully received.

Cheers

**george** · 19-Oct-2005, 08:03 PM

Here goes mate... a lot of these ideas stem from my own beliefs and theories. Use as your own risk.

I think first impressions do count so fiddling (ooh err) with the homepage may help a bit. Maybe put the credit card logos at the end of the page logo, on the right hand side. Apart from possibly the first one, make the images in the centre block (the product sections) the same size, this makes it a bit tidier too. You can alter the templates to reduce the white space between the fragments. The more you see on first glance at the homepage the better?

I'd donate one of the side boxes to the UACC logo, clickable to an explanation of what its about. Keep it high up one side too. Squeeze the links on the 'site security box together. Personally I'd shift them to the left hand side, under the section list menu. A more traditional place for `help` links.

If you need the credit card logos at the top, maybe ditch the box with them on the left for something more useful. If you want to keep them there get the Paypal one squeezed in too.

Most of the users of the 'net do not have a clue what Protx, Worldpay, etc, so I'm not sure you gain any cred by displaying the logo.

To me, your catalog (damn, got me typing in American now) index page is more inviting than your actual homepage. Food for thought maybe? (First course)

One thing I had for ages on our homepage was two scrolling football headlines (taken from footie news sites) which obviously updated themselves very often. Now it made the homepage loading time more but I KNOW that some of my customers liked them. It was like they looked up to see the latest football headlines from TWO news services at the same time. Not sure if a Hollywood jobie would work for you, even in a side box. Food etc? (Pudding)

Oh, and where's all the Braveheart stuff?

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