Feedback on site please!

[Gordoh]

Hi All,

We are trying to maximize our site in regards to SEO, content, usability, design etc etc to make it as good as it can be.

Does anyone have feedback on the site below? Anything would be good!

We are currently on V10 and will be upgrading to V11 soon.

http://www.95percentshop.co.uk/

Thanks

G

[leehack]

My initial reaction i quite like the somewhat quirky or different feel/look to the site. The one thing i think is very wrong is the width of the sidebars and thus the lack of the width for the business area the central column. The sidebars do not want to be overtaking the screen, especially when viewing products. Get products to come forward on screen and the rest of it to drift off to the background when looking at them. Having product images smaller than the sidebars is a big mistake IMO, remember what you are trying to do - sell products, show them to us.

[Gordoh]

Thanks Lee,

You're very right about that. I should have increased the size of the images on the product pages a long time ago but as the black box is an actual image and not just a coded border I would have to remake all of the images, and replace them. There are quite a few to say the least!

I was before going to change for aesthetic reasons but now you have raised the point about the sidebars I will have to face my demons and do it!

Thanks - any other feedback would be great!

[leehack]

The border is fine, i have no problem with that, it's part of the quirk. What is madness is to have it as part of the image, make sure you don't do that again, much better to have a plain white background to the images and instead add the border or background colour to the container via css. You could literally change the border colour across the whole site in 10 seconds then. You seem to be alluding to this anyway, definitely the way forward.

[Mike Hughes]

1. Your pages are slow to load.

Total HTTP Requests: 56
Total Size: 574,942 Bytes

HTML: 134,035 Bytes
HTML Images: 70,236 Bytes
CSS Images: 42,464 Bytes
Total Images: 112,700 Bytes
Javascript: 317,502 Bytes
CSS: 10,705 Bytes

Turning on compression will help speed things up, but also work on reducing the overall image sizes and amount of javascript. There's also lots of commented out html code that can be deleted.

2. Some of your meta descriptions are wrong. the BlueD ones all seem to be about the collar bottle no matter what the actual product is.

3. I think there's a distinct lack of unique product description / content on the page. Couple that with the same massive menu content on avery page and it could lead to disaster. At the moment Google seems Ok reading large menus as content but there's a distinct risk of these pages being de-duped from the index. (in fact of the 2040 pages Google acknowledges, only 692 are deemed worthy of appearing in the serps).

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 692 already displayed.

This may be why a search for 'blue delft touch of blue mug' ends up returning the blue bowl page. (although it does get pole position so some things are working well for you).

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

Re page load times. You're loading actiniccore.js and actinicextras.js twice. The second time with some additional query parameters which may override browser caching.

[Gordoh]

Thanks guys,

I am pretty much self taught and I had to take over the site, been doing it for about a year now so I still don't understand everything, ignorance is not bliss!

Re Norman
I think I have now removed these, am I right that it would be wise to remove the second time it loads for the reason you said?

Re page load times. You're loading actiniccore.js and actinicextras.js twice. The second time with some additional query parameters which may override browser caching.

Re Mike:
Could you point me in the direction of where to do this?

Turning on compression will help speed things up, but also work on reducing the overall image sizes and amount of javascript. There's also lots of commented out html code that can be deleted.

Also, you're right about the content on those pages - the brand is relatively new and being an exclusive distributor we got everything first. The people who make the product haven't released descriptions yet sadly! Thanks for the Meta Desc find, I must have buggered something up when I bulk uploaded that range.

Hopefully I will be able to get rid of that menu when I put in the MegaMenu, which should help?

Re Lee:
Thanks again, I am now setting up the .css to implement this. I will have to make two sets of every product image like before, as our site is so full of imagery as I think it would damage the load times loading up images which are re-sized by code and not the actual image. If only I could use one image for all the different states, placements!

What is madness is to have it as part of the image, make sure you don't do that again, much better to have a plain white background to the images and instead add the border or background colour to the container via css.

[Mike Hughes]

Turning on compression may need your host's help. It all depends on who your host is.

Mike