Please review my new site!

[GolfGripsDirect]

Hi guys, just gone live with my new site (designed and built by myself) and whilst the search engine spiders are feeling their way around i'd really appreciate any feedback!

This is my first time building an actinic shop from the bottom up so any comments would be real useful.

http://www.hobby-tools.co.uk/

I've still got some serious image optimisation to do (compression / sprites) to bring down the page load times as well as moving some inline css styles to an external stylesheet and i'm just starting to populate the meta tags/description, but apart from that i'm pretty satisfied!

Would be grateful for your thoughts guys

Cheers, Rob

[Mike Hughes]

Looks good. The first three things I'd work on improving are:

1. The 'Shop' links goes via the cgi-bin.

2. There are too many section pages with no content on them. These will do poorly in the search engines, push the product pages too far down and lead to customers leaving as too many clicks are needed.

i.e.

-> Golf Clubs:
-> Snake eyes Golf Clubs:
-> Snakes Eyes Irons:
-> Snakes Eyes Python XL:
-> Product Page

I'm sure I remember seeing somewhere that as a general rule people should be able to get to the page they want within three clicks. With faster internet speeds and computers this may not be so much of a problem but it's something to be aware of.

3. At first glance I was pleasantly surprised to see your forum was active but it all looks like spam posts. You need to keep on top of that.

Mike

[GolfGripsDirect]

Thanks Mike, although that's my older site! Any chance you could take a peek at the other shop in my sig?

Cheers, Rob

[leehack]

The golf-grip-direct site has a Trojan downloader when i visit according to Kaspersky.

[GolfGripsDirect]

The golf-grip-direct site has a Trojan downloader when i visit according to Kaspersky.

Ooh lawd thanks for that Lee, i'll investigate it as soon as i'm home.

Any thoughts on hobby-tools.co.uk?

Cheers, Rob

[leehack]

The hobby site - i like where it is going, you have too many things on screen fighting for people's attention though, it's all too busy and no breathing space. I think the main problem is that you've gone big with some messages and then realised that other messages are more important and therefore need to be bigger and ended up with a page that's confusing to the eye and doesn't draw you in to any particular area. Love where it's going, give things defined areas and breathing space though.

Remember. if you want people to listen to something, you whisper it, you don't shout it.

[GolfGripsDirect]

Thanks Lee, I have a bad habit of avoiding negative space even though it creates just as much of an impact. The site's theme has been evolving for the last 2 months since starting my mockup but hopefully I'll get it to feel a bit more relaxed.

Cheers, Rob

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Mike, although that's my older site!

Oops. Sorry.

The golf-grip-direct site has a Trojan downloader when i visit according to Kaspersky.

Worrying that my Kaspersky didn't complain. I'll have to look at that.

Any chance you could take a peek at the other shop in my sig?

The site looks good. Nice colours, clean navigation, clear appearance.

There's something about the product layout that looks odd to me. I suspect its the layout being 'Text: Image : Buy Details' (from L-R). What I think is happening is that I look at the image first, then have to look left to read the text, then go to the far right to see the price details.

I personally think that the more usual layout of 'Image : text : Buy' works better.

I'm also not a fan of 'blocking' the price details. To me it makes it look as if it's a separate item to the product image / text rather than being part of it.

Mike

[GolfGripsDirect]

Thanks Mike, I had a bit of a headache getting consistency across the product pages since some products have all of 2 sentences for description and others have a bulleted summary and several paragraphs of description. Cheers for identifying that the text-image-price doesn't flow very well, gonna have to have a bit of a rethink.

Thanks for your compliments too guys, means alot.

Rob