New pet advertising website.

petads

New Pet Advertising Website what do you think of it layout, design any suggestions any ideas how to get more traffic and sales. Thanks. www.petads.ie

Cianos

Overall the design looks nice and clean.

Some thoughts;

• No need for the central "Pet Ads" badge in the middle of the horizontal bar. It interrupts the horizontal line, and the logo in the top left is plenty for representing the brand on-page.
• What's the difference between "pets" and "directory"? Knowing where to go to view ads is confusing because of the similar implications.
• You should put some of the latest ads on the front page. Maybe 4 so you can give them ample space and allow the photographs to look good.
• I would not recommend charging €3 per ad in the beginning. No one will see the value in paying if the site looks empty. It'd be better to have free listings in the beginning and charge later. Or, have free listings for everyone with the option to pay for extra benefits.

Do you have a sample of an ad page?

petads

Hi Cianos, Thanks for your feedback,
Pets are the animal side of the website for sale, lost or found,wanted ect.
The Directory is for boarding kennels, pet farms, pet shops, vets, all business and services to do with pets and animals. I only have the website up 2 weeks so I have not got any ads yet,

limerick_lady

On a purely aesthetic note, I would recommend only allowing one section on the left hand side to be expanded at any one time (i.e. Pets for Sale, Accessories etc) When you have one expanded, and then expand a 2nd one, I feel the 1st one should compress automatically as otherwise, you can have all of them expanded at once. This makes the page very long with a lot of whitespace!

Best of luck with it though!!

petads

Hi Limerick_Lady, Thanks for youre comments.
I will look into that but it might not look to bad with ads on it less white space.

Cianos

Another point;

At the moment you have several categories of pets. It would be better to put all pet ads in to one category to begin with, and then expand when needed. Otherwise it will take way longer for the site to look busy and worth spending time on.

petads

Cianos wrote: »

Another point;

At the moment you have several categories of pets. It would be better to put all pet ads in to one category to begin with, and then expand when needed. Otherwise it will take way longer for the site to look busy and worth spending time on.

Hi Cianos,
Good point when you click on pets, pet accessories, wanted, lost and found in the horizontal bar it should tell you if any listings are found. I might also put recent ads on home page somewhere to point people where to go because as you say you could get lost or not find what you were looking for.

tricky D

From the homepage:

You can omit the Home link from the horizontal nav bar. It's linked to from the logo anyway though this link isn't needed on the homepage itself.

+1 on the Pet Ads badge getting in the way.

The text copy in the middle of the page is weak. It's better to have your best/top pricing tier offers and sellers in that space and address your users' issues, offer solutions and get them to act (Get in touch, Advertise now). Mentioning things like 'encoutering difficulties' pushes the user to a more negative view so don't mention such matters.

The navigation needs some reworking and has confused duplication. Directory doesn't convey it's content very well and is a weak word for SEO. Your 5 main categories appear to be Pets Wanted, Pets for Sale, Pet Products, Pet Services and Lost and Found. I would make these the categories and omit Directory. Use those as the nav with Advertise and Contact each with dropdowns as needed. If you use the horizontal nav as your main nav method with dropdowns where require, you can free up your left hand side panels for high tier/revenue ads.

Place Ad isn't strong enough, could be in a badge or similar graphic.

Your business model appears to be flat with just the option for a €3 listing. You need to adopt the most successful listing/classified/directory model which gives a Free basic offering and then tiered options at various prices. whatclinic.com is one of the best examples of this. You will have to roll up your sleeves and input much of this content yourself. Without doing this you won't get the critical mass of listings required to be credible and hence useful. You also need to give reasons for people to buy ads of you. How many visit the site, the category, how many click through to ads, how many sales made... or some testimonials until you get enough traffic to provide that data.

Contact page has no postal address. This is vital for trust and I wouldn't advise anybody to use a consumer site like yours without it. Put a contact form there too.

Try not to use 'Click Here' as links.

Can't comment on the listings as I can't find any.

The page URLs are like '?cat=1284413919968&page=1' which would better with something more descriptive and SEO keyword relevant. small-animals.html is ideal. Get a module for this or use redirects. This is important for the SEO which is vital for your success. Start using Social Media sites too.

You need a Privacy Policy and an RBN preferably.

I would also squeeze an extra 60/70 pixels of width in the layout.


hth/gl

petads

Thanks tricky D for your review I will take all that on board, some very good points that I can work on.

BengaLover

Nice looking site but can I ask what would you do regarding scammers?
On adoos and add and olx there are literally hundreds of puppies and kittens etc being advertised by scammers....There are report buttons, but most of these scammers repeat their ads daily and get away with it.
They offer pedigree cats or dogs for less than what you would pay elsewhere and then offer to have the animal couriered to you, you never get the animal, cos there was never one, and they get your cash....

petads

BengaLover,
I have not heard of that scam but i would warn people about it on the website. But with buying anything people should always use common sense.