Site review please!

[Michaels]

Hi Everyone,

I've been looking on here looking at the advice (so thanks!), but I have just plucked up the courage to sign up and ask for a site review!

The site is an e-commerce site for a small chain of Jewellery shops and is in Actinic Catalog V9.

This is all new to me and I am by no means experienced in website design or SEO... so I have read some books etc and I hope to gain some success.... one day!!!

Any advice will be gratefully recieved, and thank you in advance for looking/helping!

The website address is:
www.michaelsjewellery.co.uk

All the best,

Matt

[Mike Hughes]

Top three things that come to my mind:

1. The images on the main page are too large. 85KB banner images plus three of 44KB, 39KB and 49KB. Just those four are 220KB which is really too large, even in these days of broadband.

2. The banner image is only 1230 wide so doesn't cover the full screen on a 1280 setup leaving odd bits at the side (on the front page it's centered, on the other it's left alligned). A bit of work to the image could make it look better and give you a single colour that can be used for a seamless background. And make it smaller to avoid scrollbars on smaller screens.

3. All your links go via the cgi-bin. This is really only necessary if you're using customer accounts and makes life much harder for the search engines.

Mike

[leehack]

I think the problem with a site like this is that although to you it's new and exciting and you've clearly put in some effort, to me it looks like a site built 5-6 years ago. Ecommerce in general is in a far more advanced stage than what this site has been built to and in industries like jewellery, which are severely saturated online, i don't think bare minimum builds and approaches like this will actually achieve much.

360 video with multiple images of products are where things are at, not random sized single images of rather poor detail as you have. You are not even coming close to bridging the gap between people not being able to touch or take a close up look of these items.

The web is too mature now to allow site owners to learn their trade and make a living in the process, it's too competitive. You have to hit the floor running if the site is anything other than a bit of fun or a hobby. If you don't know what you need to get things up and running, you're starting a new site on a greased pole and expecting it to be able to climb - the harsh reality is that this will not happen and almost all of the time, this approach just adds another site onto the WWW graveyard.

A typical example to put that into perspective is that you've chosen the worst theme ever which uses the worst navigation method ever. Use the best sites in your industry to show you where you need to be, you don't want to be putting such great efforts into a journey that is going down the wrong road. Apologies for the lack of sugar coating, i'm no good at that approach, at this stage i think reality is far more important.

[Michaels]

Hi and thanks for the replies so far!

Wow I guess we are quite rubbish then... and there was me thinking it looked OK!!!

Your opinions are very much appreciated, and I agree with all your points. However I guess maybe I should of said that our main business is in physical shops and this was just a tester to see what happens and what I could achieve. The whole 360 video thing would be FANTASTIC, but for us is simply unrealistic. I do not currently have the knowledge to do this, and we arent prepare to pay alot to make it happen as we follow the old way of keeping our costs down, so we can keep our prices as low as possible. I do however agree totally that this approach probably will not pay off on the internet ... but hey I guess we will see!!!!

Thanks again, and I am looking forward to recieving any other opinions!

All the best,

Matt