Site review

[jxm28788]

thanks, I will definately move over to weight based postage as £5.00 seems to be putting a lot of people off!

However, as I've just found out that nearly half my visitors are apparently put off just by looking at my home page I think I will do the redesign first!

Just trawling through the templates trying to figure out which bits to change - it's a real pain with all these variables because I have no way of visualising what it's trying to do and it calls so many subpages I'm all over the place - basically have no idea what's going on...

[elfinp]

50% of people staying longer than 2 minutes is EXCELLENT! You just need greater numbers hitting your site I suspect. A well designed campaign with something like google adwords or Overture (used by yahoo/msn/altavista et al) will help and because you have such a specialised product you should get higher-than-average visitors:buyers ratio. And with google at least you can specifiy your advertising budget and it won't let you go over that. Haven't set up my Overture account yet but I suspect they run on the same basis.

I say well designed because a poorly designed campaign can get you thousands of hits -all of which you pay for - and none of whom will buy. My campaigns for my site will be managed by a company specialising in promotion for small businesses at low cost - and as an ex partner in the company (I left 5 years ago) I can vouch for their professional committment! They charge £25.00 per month to manage up to 50 (I think) seperate campaigns and I am in no way affiliated to them except in the sense still being friends with one of the existing partners! I dunno if the £25.00 a month I'm charged is discounted but I think its their standard rate.

Steph

[jxm28788]

50% of people staying longer than 2 minutes is EXCELLENT!

The thing is that I'm not in any search engines yet, so most of the traffic I'm getting is through goodle adwords.

As my ads use very specific keywords, and explain in the ad what my site does, I would expect that most users would come to the site knowing what my site is (a shop) and what it is selling (low carb foods). Therefore it seems strange to me that 50% of people who specifically clicked on a shop selling what they're looking for should then whiz off again without really going past the first couple of pages.

It seems to me that they are taking one look at it and thinking 'amateur', then rushing off to find one that looks more 'professional'. (ie A proper store that has been well designed and probably is quite a big organisation that's been around for ages, as opposed to a fly by night cowboy who knocked up the site over the weekend...)

But that's just my thoughts, which may bear no connection to reality...

additionally, I am getting a high click through ratio, but the key words simply don't rack up that many impressions to generate sufficient traffic as I guess there aren't that many people sitting at home in the UK looking for low carb stuff...

[elfinp]

I'd suggest cautiously editing your campaign to aim at health food and low fat shoppers as well (and as someone else mentioned, kc / nutrition info probably a good idea throughout). If it becomes the case that your click through ratio drops too much then you can always change it. But I'd also suggest other stuff before diong that.

What has occured to me whilst messing around with pva and cardboard boxes (don't ask... ingenuity and lack of money make for some interesting business props!) is that its a very male site. Its blue, dark and kinda chunky - it could sell fishing equipment or guys bad-weather hiking clothing - and by looking at it and your posts here I'd summarise that you're probably male, over 40, possibly with health problems hence the interest in healthy food, and had difficulty finding the right sort of stuff on the net at a reasonable price yourself.... ;-) But I would also think that that is NOT your target consumer group mainly because I suspect its quite a tiny group. I didn't look at your sight and think 'low carbohydrates - yummy!' I looked at though 'that could help my diet' (I'm getting to the point now...) I suspect that most of your click throughs are women and while I'm the last person in the world to be a fan of stereotypes (me=ex teenage mum... still a mum just very much no longer a teen - so my hatred of stereotypes is rather deeply ingrained!), healthy food tends to have a more female consumer base. Even if the food is for the guys, a lot of the time I'd suspect its their wives buying it. And your site is clearly not aimed to appeal to women, or even at both genders. If it were my business I'd lighten it up, make it brighter and probably more fruity (white with maybe lime and tangerine type highlights) and more... fine. Less chunky.

If I'm being too blunt hit me with a haddock. I can't help it, I'm a Geordie.

Steph

[elfinp]

Oh one other thing... as far as editing goes the ONLY pages I had to edit for my site design to be changed to my liking were ActinicPrimary and the checkout main page (order01 I think, off the top of my head). Everything else is pretty much called into these on demand by selecting Use Parent throughout when adding new stuff and uses the same colours etc as specified in the primary template. I think (I'm certainly no expert - my html is pretty basic and while I understand the principles behind the scripting, I certainly couldn't edit any of the programming myself). I certainly had no probs changing mine to my liking with minimal effort

Steph

[jxm28788]

its a very male site. Its blue, dark and kinda chunky

ok, that hadn't occurred to me - maybe I'll go for a more female colour...

I'd summarise that you're probably male, over 40, possibly with health problems

well, I'm male so 1 out of 3 aint bad...

But I would also think that that is NOT your target consumer group

absolutely, my customers will be mostly female, probably 25-40ish, with a perception that they are overweight...

your site is clearly not aimed to appeal to women, or even at both genders. If it were my business I'd lighten it up, make it brighter and probably more fruity (white with maybe lime and tangerine type highlights)

ok, the new design is much whiter and I'll experiment with fruity colours when I've redesigned the shape.

Less chunky

why chunky? is that the current design or the new design? what's wrong with the new design? it's got rounded edges, what more do you want...

[elfinp]

I'm a bad, bad person who didn't read your previous posts propery (or just one who works 20 hour days and has a tiny baby so can be forgiven when tiredness makes her miss things!) New design much better. You might find it worthwhile in the long run hunting around for a web dev company who can take it, slice it up properly and hand you back the relevant pages if you're having difficulties integrating it yourself. There wouldn't actually be that much work involved in doing it - you're only after a page template design, nothing fancy and no expensive stuff like custom programming or databases and so if you shop around you should be able to find a company who won't screw you over completely

[jxm28788]

actually my redesign is going ok at the moment - I'm just waiting for someone to answer this -

so, for the boxes on the left, how would I do that? Would the whole bar including the logo, logo box, and 3 empty boxes just be one big graphic? Won't that be terribly slow to load?

because I haven't got a clue, and I don't want to spend all day figuring out how to do it and then finding out it was the wrong way and I have to redo it all...

I guess there could be some kind of box command, or maybe I create it as several different graphics (ie. top, left side, right side, bottom) and then build the box around the text?

any ideas?

[Jan]

I think that you main page is a big boring but your main catalog page has real wow factor, I would get rid of the brochure page.

Regards,

[elfinp]

You could do it as a single graphic I guess and while it would be slow to load its going to be smaller file size than the individual componants. Plus one thing I have found with actinic is that its a right pain for sites not refreshing pages when one returns to them which could work for you coz it means your image will be cached (pain for me because I have a very fast changing product range)... personally I've fiddled with the metatags so it has to refresh every time its loaded - pain for anyone with a slow connection - but I am kind of ignoring obselete modems whilst designing... something has to give somewhere. Not just my site, have noticed it elsewhere. If you do it as individual componants you'll probably have to use a pixel-specifying-size table to get them placed properly and make sure it works in all browsers cuz they can be tempermental. You might need to read up on web design tricks to get it looking right in all browsers.

[jxm28788]

I think that you main page is a big boring but your main catalog page has real wow factor, I would get rid of the brochure page.

funny you should say that, I was just thinking "hey this looks pretty cool, I think I'll make this my home page..."

[jxm28788]

ok, I've added the left bar with the logo and empty boxes as one graphic - that was pretty easy and only 20kb.

But how on earth do I get the text (NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONSTOP) to display over the graphic??? It only seems to let it go above or below.

I guess (hope) there is some sneaky way of doing this...?

[elfinp]

Set the graphic as a background to a table cell. Then you can stick whatever you like over it. Can't remember the exact code - probably td background="image.gif" but could be a variant like bg=... - do a quick search on google or something for basic html table use.

[jxm28788]

Nearly done, just got to figure out the spacing issue on the section list and I'm sorted.

In the mean time, how about your opinion on these 'fruitier', more female friendly colour schemes. I've used colours sampled from my logo -

http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-orange.gif
http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-orangish.gif
http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-yellowish.gif

(ignore the corners and the buttons, it's getting late and they're a bugger to fill)

[elfinp]

I like the first one. The yellow is a bit mustard

Definitely looking a lot more girly-friendly!