Please be kind - new site uploaded...

[L'il Suzie]

It seems like I've been tearing my hair out over this site forever, even had a days training with a great guy from Teclan in November, but I think we're almost ready to unleash our shop site to the general public...

...however I'd really like your opinion on how its looking & working so far - apart from absolute cr*p that is...

http://www.pullingontheglitz.co.uk/acatalog/shop.html

I changed some of the colours on one of the standard templates and now when you 'mouseover' the naviation buttons at the top the text vanishes... I haven't quite worked out which variable to change yet... I'm also still trying to pin the shop owner down to sort out the T&C so they are still a bit rough in places...

We can't afford loads of moolah for really fancy designed websites at the moment, so are going to have to put up with what I can come up with from the Actinic templates, but I'm fast running out of patience with uploading the pergamano stuff (and you should see whats waiting in the wings to be re-written 'cos I did it wrong...)

In my defence I did write all the code for our main website which has been going for several years now with loads of compliments, so I must be doing something right!

Please be kind...(ish)
Suzie
weblady, http://www.pullingontheglitz.co.uk/

[Duncan Rounding]

Hi Suzie,

So far so good - the site is simple - yet functional.
As someone never visiting you before then this is what I see:

1. Once in the shop there's no info on the shop landing page to tell me what you do or sell nor why I should buy. (what is an embelishment?)
2. You appear to have a lot of subsection nesting (for embelishments) which means lots of clicks to actually get down to a product and also that you have a long path listed on your page.
3. As you say the Terms need work to be completed.
4. There is no ssl on pages for the checkout - without that I certainly wouldn't buy.

First I think you must sort out the ssl on checkout, then sort out the terms page, and finally over time keep building and adding fragments about what it's all about and some pictures of finished items etc perhaps. Also check out similar sites to see what they do.

I think you could incorporate all the exising main site info into Actinic as brochure pages.

Hope this helps.

Duncan R

[L'il Suzie]

So far so good - the site is simple - yet functional.
As someone never visiting you before then this is what I see:

1. Once in the shop there's no info on the shop landing page to tell me what you do or sell nor why I should buy. (what is an embelishment?)

This is mainly because the e-commerce site is coming off our main website... which I know could be put on Actinic as brochure pages but frankly I haven't got the time to transfer the whole website over! I have a full time job elsewhere and am trying to do this website in my "spare" time... so not a lot of sleep happening at the moment! Who knows, in the future, I may 'port the website over...

Our current customer base are crafters who know what they want, however a bit of self promotion never hurt and I'll look into "blowing our own trumpet" a bit later...

...and an embellishment is a "thing" wot you stick onto a card or a scrapbook page to make it look pretty!!

2. You appear to have a lot of subsection nesting (for embellishments) which means lots of clicks to actually get down to a product and also that you have a long path listed on your page.

This is something that was suggested by the trainer from Teclan, the embellishments section will have other sections in it eventually apart from the acrylic gems, and each type of gem having its own page would help in the search engine stakes. I am wondering myself tho if it is a bit much, but time will tell... looking at a competitors website they seem to be going in the same direction with the amount of levels...

3. As you say the Terms need work to be completed.
4. There is no ssl on pages for the checkout - without that I certainly wouldn't buy.

T&C are being written by the boss at the moment, and as for the ssl, I thought we had that sorted with the hosts... something else for me to d/w...

I am very grateful to you for having taken the time to look at the site: over the past couple of days the boss and I have actually changed the colours and the design of the site and this will be uploaded in a while... I need to work out how to change bits of one of the Actinic templates - back to the manual!

[pinbrook]

I think you could incorporate all the exising main site info into Actinic as brochure pages.

I wouldn't necessarily go down this route. If you have the ability to use an HTML editor it is better to leave the pages outside of actinic, this allows greater flexibility for design. Brochure pages can be very restrictive.

However I would marry up the design in the 2 parts to the website.

Personally I think the catalog pages could be improved, I find the colours very confusing. It seems that most of your products are pink, purple, black, grey etc and the site colours are yellow, green & brown. The result is a confused clash. Possibly made worse by the use of a background colour and section / product images off varying sizes and orientation.

I'm not quite sure what it is about the site that re-inforces this colour clash as most websites will have product images in a variety of colours, but somehow on this site it all goes horribly wrong.