site review and feedback, please

[laura]

Hi All,

I guess new is only word to describe my position. New to this forum, new to Actinic and of course with the new website - www.lembrassa.com

(a word of warning it is a ladies lingerie site - perhaps not to be viewed from your workplace )

There was no way I could have built it myself, so I got a company to do it to my design. But if I'd known how much work and effort and time it would take, I'm not sure I would have even got started. I'm told that a lot of the things I wanted were hard to do in Actinic - but don't know if that is true or just a justification of the cost.

Anyway, it's up and running now. But as with all these things when you are too close to it you can't see the wood from the trees any more.

So if you could offer some constructive criticism - especially on ways to get customers to click past the first page - that would be really great.

Good or bad will be equally welcome - looking for honesty and helpfulness in your feedback.

Thanks to all for looking.

laura

[vistamaster]

Hi Laura,

I have visited your website, and couple of things I'd like to say...

So, when it comes to design, I did like it.

Website is not difficult to navigate, but I find vertical menu easier to navigate the site than horizontal (but it's just my user experience).

There are empty product sections on your site, without even one product in it... Do not publish it, until you have added at least one of them I prefer to receive the message saying product not found or whatever, instead of having an emty page, as it is confusing, as your first thought is "the page is still loading...", then you wait, then you refresh, the just leave the site thinking it's not working

Page Title...

I would personally click first of all in google search results on the links that contain my search term/keywords at the beginning, and on your site, I would swap over the Page Title with your company's name. (just my oppinion again )

You have a link "back to previous page", located at the top, I would not look for such a link at the top of page when viewing the product, since every browser has a back button, I see that link on your website useless, however if it was at the bottom of page, then possibly it would be helpful to the site visitors, as they scroll down all the way to the bottom of the page, and do not really need to move their mouse pointer to the top of screen in order to return to previuos page. In fact your product pages are quite short, so if that link wasn't there I wouldn't miss it

Shopping cart...

I would stretch the layout to fill that funny gap on the right.

Post Code lookup would be an advantage as it saves shoppers time.

Web address...

instead of what it is on your site now: acatalog/copy_of_copy_of_Name_of_Section___.html

make your page name from product name (Search Engine Optimisation)

something similar to: winter_sale_embrace_of_lingerie_and_swimwear.html

Images...

the size of thumbnails in my oppinion is too large, on my 20Mb/s line takes few secs to load them fully, imagine if your potential customer with 512Mb/s or even worse with dial-up...

The rest seems fine

Good luck with your site.

Regards,
Rytis

[Mike Hughes]

the size of thumbnails in my oppinion is too large, on my 20Gb/s line takes few secs to load them fully, imagine if your potential customer with 512Mb/s or even worse with dial-up...

I agree about the images being too large and needing some compression. But Rytis, what are you talking about on bandwidth? Most people only have 2-8 Mbps on broadband.

Mike

[Rich Brady]

I like the look of your site.

Definitely get rid of the "copy_of" page titles sooner rather than later, the last thing you want is to change them once the SE have indexed them.

Section images are around 600kB, it's not necessary and may slow down page load.

There's no tel number or address in your Ts and Cs which may out people off. Also, I get a this error message when trying to search or view contact us page.

The requested URL /cgi-bin/ss900033.pl was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request

All the best,

Rich

[Darren B]

I like the look of your site.

You would

Actually one thing at a quick glance, make the images on the front clickable, taking people to that product, 1st thing alot of people do is click images

[Rich Brady]

You would

What Darren are you trying to say???

Actually, I do. I have a client that's asked me to amend a site he has just acquired (don't ask), and this one looks much better. Classier...

While I'm here, the Swim wear images let you down in terms of quality, a total opposite from the lingerie images you have.

Also, there's no content, which is a let down from a customer perspective. Hide the sections until you have products.

The 1 day spectacular offer is today, which for a new site that's probably not getting many visits (except for Darren and I), why not move the date into the future?

[acompton]

Basically a nice site. Good choice of colour and font for the products.

The home page title has underscores in it.

Those pictures are far too big and take an age to load. For a while, I thought the section pages didn't have any pictures. Some of the section page thumbnails look a little squashed width-ways.

I don't recognise any of the brand names. I would have thought in this market, you would have a job persuading customers to try new brands (but I'm a man and don't know much about lingerie )

T's & C's are a bit thin.

[Rich Brady]

(but I'm a man and don't know much about lingerie )

Obviously you know enough to state that your usual suppliers aren't there!

[leehack]

I've been looking for an hour, sorry what we supposed to be doing on this site?

[Rich Brady]

I've been looking for an hour, sorry what we supposed to be doing on this site?

LOL The last 2 posts of yours that I have read have had me chuckling to myself. Thanks Lee.

[leehack]

Pleasure Rich, .

[Darren B]

Pleasure Rich

Nope im not that kind of guy

[Rich Brady]

Nope im not that kind of guy

PMSL PMSL

[laura]

Many thanks.

Thanks to all you guys for the great help and feedback.

Sorry to have put you through the trauma of viewing all those pictures - hope you all make a fast recovery .

I'll be making changes - especially to the page names and titles as a number of you suggested.

The image sizes you are right about and that was supposed to be fixed yesterday - I have new smaller images all ready. Don't know what has happened there or why the mini-images didn't get up to the server.

Using Internet Explorer, I don't get any error when trying to view the contact us page and that's where the phone numbers and addresses are located. Webd -what browser were you using or do you know of any other reason why you might have got that error when I don't?

Forgot to say, that the site specialises in clothes for "larger ladies". The brands I stock are at the quality end of the market. I'm really glad the you men did not know that - I would be a bit concerned if they were your favourite brands .

I just want to add how grateful I am that people took the time to look at the site and post replies. This has been a big help to me - I'm so glad this forum exists.

Thanks again,

laura

[Rich Brady]

Using Internet Explorer, I don't get any error when trying to view the contact us page and that's where the phone numbers and addresses are located. Webd -what browser were you using or do you know of any other reason why you might have got that error when I don't?

I use FF3, but they're displaying now.