New Website - opinions needed

Best Price Accessories

Hi, i recently bought a small online electronics company and I'm doing everything I can to get it to take off . This included relaunching the website
www.bestpriceaccessories.ie
I've already received good marketing ideas from this forum and thought it was worth asking people what they thought. I've asked quite a few people about SEO work but so far nobody has got back to me...........

Your help is really appreciated!

tricky D

Where's your RBN?

The logo doesn't make much of an impact (branding).

There's no special offers, free stuff, promos (buried at the bottom), just reward points which is poorly highlighted.

There is room for SEO improvement e.g. the URLs are bad. There are almost no links to the site.


The design is lacking and needs a lot of work. It would be a good idea to request a review over in the Web Design forum where it's more appropriate.

A few sample design points:
Images are scaled so don't resize well (look jagged). They should be resized properly for product and thumbnail shot display sizes.
The listings page layout is awful (one listing per line layout).
Text too small in places.
Navigation menu dropdown text should be left aligned not centered.
Checkout process doesn't outline the steps well.
No credit card payments except through PayPal??? That's a killer if it is the case.

Kitchen Expert

Hi,

I agree with tricky D, the website needs a good bit of work.

It looks quite basic and should have more of a techy feel to it. I would make the colours stronger and don't detract from the logo by having a menu bar above it. Also, your URL's don't mention the product. In other words, you don't have any keywords in the URL's.

Tricky D, can you explain what the RBN is?

Best Price Accessories

Thanks! Does anybody know a designer/SEO willing to do some work at decent rates - I thought i could teach myself but I haven't a clue!

bigneacy

Yeah its very basic looking, the logo isn't great and the layout doesn't work

Needs a complete overhaul... if you've $250 lying around get the lads at logotournament.com to give the logo a go for ya.

oldat31

bigneacy wrote: »

Yeah its very basic looking, the logo isn't great and the layout doesn't work

Needs a complete overhaul... if you've $250 lying around get the lads at logotournament.com to give the logo a go for ya.

Dude, 250 euro, will get you a professional designer and not a bunch of hacks with cracked photoshop designing it for yea.

I have to agree with all the above. Google web design and designing a web site tips. You will understand a little more about what your trying to do.

bigneacy

oldat31 wrote: »

Dude, 250 euro, will get you a professional designer and not a bunch of hacks with cracked photoshop designing it for yea.

I have to agree with all the above. Google web design and designing a web site tips. You will understand a little more about what your trying to do.

€250 is not the same as $250. €50 in the difference. The designers are very talented at logotournament. I'm not a designer and I have nothing to do with the site but I would rather give a brief and get a couple of dozen creative minds working on it, than get one designer with one idea who thinks he knows more than me for my €200 quid.

There's countless other sites based on the same concept out there and some of them are netting huge global clients to let them fight it out for the prize.

oldat31

bigneacy wrote: »

€250 is not the same as $250. €50 in the difference. The designers are very talented at logotournament. I'm not a designer and I have nothing to do with the site but I would rather give a brief and get a couple of dozen creative minds working on it, than get one designer with one idea who thinks he knows more than me for my €200 quid.

There's countless other sites based on the same concept out there and some of them are netting huge global clients to let them fight it out for the prize.

If you actully believe that then your a fool.

No self respecting designer will use a crowd sorcing site.

Its a way toi make 200 students and wannabes do the work in the HOPE they win. Its like asking 200 builders to build houses but il only buy the 1 i like.... Think about it.

bigneacy

oldat31 wrote: »

Its like asking 200 builders to build houses but il only buy the 1 i like.... Think about it.

that sounds brilliant. i must be a fool so :rolleyes:

PhatPiggins

oldat31 wrote: »

If you actully believe that then your a fool.

No self respecting designer will use a crowd sorcing site.

Its a way toi make 200 students and wannabes do the work in the HOPE they win. Its like asking 200 builders to build houses but il only buy the 1 i like.... Think about it.

Thanks you've made me smile

Atlas_IRL

oldat31 wrote: »

If you actully believe that then your a fool.

No self respecting designer will use a crowd sorcing site.

Its a way toi make 200 students and wannabes do the work in the HOPE they win. Its like asking 200 builders to build houses but il only buy the 1 i like.... Think about it.

There is thousands of top class designers using crowd sourcing sites daily. :rolleyes:

gavney1

hi

im not a web designer, and have limi ted knowledge on this stuff

BUT as a consum er, I have to say that your site looks a bit..........well, for want of a better word "dodgy"

I think people are always a little wary when buying electronics as we've all bought a dodgy TV or cable in our lives at some stage. So, I think everyone is extra wary when buying electronics.

Best Price Accessories

Oh janey - dodgy is the last thing I'm aiming for - thanks for being open and frank! I'm on a mission to get this site doing well - will let you know of my progress!

Chet Zar

Would definitely be worth your while looking at some web design basics and compare your own site with other similar sites. Also as mentioned SEO needs to be looked at and URLs need to be descriptive, not index.php and so on.

Basic things need to be right and to make sure this is the case you also need to check how your site looks in different browsers for example in Chrome the Facebook button has dropped down onto the main nav instead of staying aligned with the Twitter button, whereas in Firefox it is fine.

All in all it's a very basic looking site, needs to make better use of colour, text size and font and the site logo could be vastly improved.

Definitely something you need to look at seriously because with all of the above contributing to a poor look and feel and first impression, users will be very likely to just bounce off your site and never come back.

dotnetster

Ok, where do you begin with this!

1. Most folks eyes wander up to the top right hand side of the screen looking for a search text box. I noticed that there doesn't appear to be a search option at all.

2. The Facebook and Twitter buttons are a wee bit in your face, ie they are more prominant than the more important sections like: 'Create an Account' etc.

3. The 1-Column layout on the homepage is truly terrible. There is nothing to attract the eye. What you need is maybe a slider animation to keep the visitor interested. Maybe this slider could show featured products.

4. I think someone already mentioned this, but your 'Promotional Offers' link is buried deep in the footer in -10 font. These offers should be more 'in-your-face'

5. The homepage mentions that the 'aPad' is coming soon, and to check out the latest blog entry. Do the visitor a favour, and provide a link to that blog entry. This is just damn laziness.

6. Ok so, I go and click on the 'Blog' link in the header (which again is a tiny font). I scroll down to look at the "New & Improved Site" link, and click to see the 1 Comment. This somehow redirects me back to the homepage. Eh?

7. I think someone else mentioned how awful the product listing pages were already, so I won't go over this again. I actually had to squint to see the prices on the Cables page.

The shopping cart is powered by Zen Cart which is a tried and tested cart engine, so I reckon the the actually process of adding to cart, and checking out works as expected. Would I buy something from your site. I'm afraid not. I will be sticking with dabs.ie or komplett.ie. Take a quick look at these sites. This is how it should be done.

If this is the relaunched site, God only know what the original one looked like. I might just pop ove the way-back machine to see!

Best Price Accessories

Thanks for the constructive criticism - keep it coming. there'll be a new version in about 2 weeks which will take it all on board and hopefully do well

John368

Best Price

The site is clean and not too cluttered and it looks good.

I assume that the marketing advantage that you have is your price. So, I suggest that you should make the price font slightly bigger.

Also, you need to mention postage and packaging somewhere. Often I just will not bother going to the checkout on sites like this without getting some indication of P&P costs as I have often after going to checkout I have been disappointed that the P&P can make the product more expensive than buying it in the local shop.

JOhn

Best Price Accessories

Bit the bullet and got a professional to completely redesign the store - fingers crossed and thanks to everybody for the feedback.

John368

Best price

It is good to get feedback like this and see what you actually did.

I might even try buying a few things from it.

I hope it goes well for you.

Buy the way have you tried selling on ebay as well as that is very good way to get customers to go to your website I believe. I get all my stationary from a website now that I first found on ebay.

John

Andy_Black

Some questions you might ask yourself:

What's your business goals?
How is the website going to help you achieve them?
What are people searching for that you sell or could sell online?
What do the top sites look like that are competing on these keywords?
Can you match or better those sites?
Why would people buy from you and not those sites?
Can you start smaller and get profitable, then evolve/grow your site?

Axwell

You still havent fixed the url so they are search engine friendly. For example if I click on Audio and then go to speakers the address should be /audio-speakers not /index.php?main_page=blahblah

For SEO you need to have Search Engine Friendly urls so that Google can read them and you will get much better listings in the search engines as a result.

Also nowhere in your page titles or keywords do you mention Ireland. If I was looking for something I would more than likely put Ipod accessories Ireland to narrow the search down in Google, you are missing out on keywords that you should have. Also your keywords should be seperated by a "," which you do at the end but the ones at the start just seem bundled together.

Your meta description is a copy and paste of your meta keywords.

You have to put the work into the SEO to get the benefits, putting a new website up on its own wont have the desired effect. I had pmmed you back at the time of your initial post with a lot of these points mentioned but your "professional" seems to have ignored a lot of the SEO basics and just designed a new site on its own for you.

The affiliate page isnt working properly either. Also the grey text on all the pages linked at the bottom, privacy etc is hard to read.

Sorry if it all seems critical but the SEO is something thats very important and if your designer is supposed to be a professional then those things should have been discussed or addressed. Overall the site is a huge improvement on the what was there before but it still needs work before it is the finished article.

Best Price Accessories

thanks everybody. I should have mentioned SEO is underway! But next thing is to figure out target market and answer the questions Andy kindly posted. Essentially we're competing on price and speed of getting the product to the end user but this needs to be developed more!

All the best and thanks again

EIREHotspur

Best Price.....website as of now doesn't look too bad.....it is better than a lot of websites I have seen for business.

You need a rotator showing your best offers on the HOME page....not hiding (even if it is one click) away.

I would be wary too based on how little products you have for sale at the moment....you need a lot more choice to bring people to the website.

Plebs

It sounds to me like your USP is price.

I'd expect to see lots of red/yellow/sale/prices slashed!/Ryanair-style notifications.

Are you sure that competing on price as an e-tailor operating in the consumer electronics sector is such a good idea?

PaulPinnacle

Axwell wrote: »

Sorry if it all seems critical but the SEO is something thats very important...

Best Price Accessories wrote: »

I should have mentioned SEO is underway! But next thing is to figure out target market and answer the questions Andy kindly posted.

While certain elements of SEO need to be very targeted and require the type of information you're now looking at focusing on, most (all to be honest) of the points Axwell raised are the 'basic building blocks' and will be relevant regardless of any other factors.

Getting things like SE friendly URL's and accurate/beneficial meta descriptions in place are totally independent of those questions (which I fully agree that you do spend some time on to assist in planning other elements of the site/business) and are part of the basic on page SEO which should be done by default.

Fergal C

I'd also agree that the site needs some design improvement. To be honest the site doesn't look professional enough to inspire consumer confidence and that will make visitors reluctant to buy, however it does sound as if you are sorting that. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the site is very wide, I have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see all of the home page (a pet hate of mine, sorry).

Have you considered setting up an eBay store and selling some of your products from there, it could work in tandem with your own site?

John368

Best Price

I actually opened an account withyou to try and see how it all worked.

I have big reservations about the way it works. If you compete on price only, you will have to attract the casual buyer as far as I see. The account system seems to set up to put off the casual buyer.

I tested it out a little by putting an item worth 10 quid in the cart and then clicked checkout. I then got to a page which did not show the cost of P&P. P&P in my experience can vary from free to maybe 5 to 10 quid on the item like the one I had choosen.

I did not want to go any further as I was afraid that I would have been committed to buy it if I did. No doubt the P&P would be shown on later pages and I would not have committed to buy it unless I had given my Paypal or Credit card details, however, there was a slight doubt in my mind. When I exited the checkout, I was asked if I wanted to save the items in my cart - I was a little annoyed at that as if I had made a mistake and clicked "yes" (which sometimes happen if you are in a hurry) the site would retain that info and perhaps use it again or send me unwanted emails to remind me that I had not purchased it. Or worse automatically at it to my cart the next time I visited the site and did buy something.

John

EIREHotspur

The suggestion to try ebay is a good one but...

[QUOTE=...... One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the site is very wide, I have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see all of the home page (a pet hate of mine, sorry)........

[/QUOTE]

The website is 980pixels wide.....modern websites that aspire to break away from 1990s web design are 1000 pixels and a bit above that.

amazon.com is 980 pixels wide
play.com is 990 pixels wide

abc.com is 995 pixels, soccernet.com is 970 pixels, rte.ie is 1000 pixels

Try upping your resolution if you want to look at modern websites...a pet hate of mine is people stuck in 1990s web design mode.....we shouldn't have to cater for people with Celeron PCs with low resolutions.

Also design websites for Broadband users now....only way we can get more users to get braodband of some kind is to leave dialup users behind......just like digital tv will do to analogue tv users in 2012.

Pixelcraft

You're incorrect EIREHotspur, take amazon - it's not 980 pixels wide, it's a fluid layout. For fixed layouts 960 px is generally accepted as a maximum design width, unless you're using techniques to serve different resolutions/devices.

Also remember, while you may browse will a full size window, not everyone does

EIREHotspur

Pixelcraft wrote: »

You're incorrect EIREHotspur, take amazon - it's not 980 pixels wide, it's a fluid layout. For fixed layouts 960 px is generally accepted as a maximum design width, unless you're using techniques to serve different resolutions/devices.

Also remember, while you may browse will a full size window, not everyone does

No Pixelcraft.....I am right....your the one who is wrong.

The main Div in amazon.com is called DIV#page-wrap and has a min-width of 980px.
That is the main wrapper div.


The main wrapper div on the rte website is 1000px...thats a class wrapper called .wrapper.Grey

Download the pages.....go into Dreamweaver and test it for yourself.

I don't browse in a full size window....I have a 1920x1200 screen.
According to stats.....
57% of computer users use a higher resolution than 1024x768
35% use 1024x768

I am in the majority.........get your facts straight.

Pixelcraft

Sigh.

Amazon - It's a flexible layout. end of.

Secondly, once again you're assuming people browse with 100% maximized windows with your resolution statistics (which I'd love to know where you got them from!). A much better metric is the browser window size.

BTW, realising this is going off topic so it doesn't need to be covered here.

Fergal C

EIREHotspur wrote: »

...
The website is 980pixels wide.....modern websites that aspire to break away from 1990s web design are 1000 pixels and a bit above that.

amazon.com is 980 pixels wide
play.com is 990 pixels wide

abc.com is 995 pixels, soccernet.com is 970 pixels, rte.ie is 1000 pixels

My screen res is 1024 x 768, I can view the full screen width of every website you listed, without having to use a horizontal scroll bar. However, when I visit http://www.bestpriceaccessories.ie/ I have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see all the content. Here's a screen shot http://awesomescreenshot.com/003q7j99

EIREHotspur wrote: »

...Try upping your resolution if you want to look at modern websites...a pet hate of mine is people stuck in 1990s web design mode.....we shouldn't have to cater for people with Celeron PCs with low resolutions...

I look at modern websites every day, without any problems and it is very rare that I ever have to use a horizontal scroll bar.

EIREHotspur wrote: »

......a pet hate of mine is people stuck in 1990s web design mode.....we shouldn't have to cater for people with Celeron PCs with low resolutions...

You don't have to cater for anyone IMO. It's not what I would describe as a customer focused or user-friendly approach, but you are welcome to insist that visitors change their settings to that they can browse your sites.

tricky D

EIREHotspur wrote: »

No Pixelcraft.....I am right....your the one who is wrong.

The main Div in amazon.com is called DIV#page-wrap and has a min-width of 980px.
That is the main wrapper div.

Sigh +1.

It's using min-width precisely to enable it to be fluid except they don't want some divs to wrap. Despite not wrapping those divs, it's nevertheless flexible. Otherwise they would just use width for the whole page.

John368

Web-designers - behave yourselves.

Nobody can get a word in edgeways for the noise of rattles crashing around the prams.

John

EIREHotspur

Ok to Fergal apologies....his is 1200 pixels wide thats why you have to scroll.

Wats_in_a_name

I would try and fix the width issue. I have no problem with amazon or play but with your site a scroll bar pops up and I can't see everything which is a massive pain for trying to browse.