Please can you give me your thoughts and advice on my website

Graham wrote: »

I like it. Simple, clean uncluttered design, easy path to purchase with no unnecessary barriers on the way.

If sales permit, I would think about an alternative payment processor to Paypal at some point in the future. Many people just don't like using PayPal.

I'm surprised you're not charging for shipping, that must eat into your margin significantly for international sales. If you're not going to charge extra for shipping, it might be worth emphasising the fact that shipping is included. At the moment, shipping costs are just kind of not mentioned across the site.

Nice work Mr Porridge, hope it goes well for you.

Mr. G wrote: »

I like it. Nice clean easy modern feel to it.

There's no address on the Contact page.

The local buttons at the bottom of the page don't like to your social network pages, you should update these with links to your own social network pages.

The Pontiac wrote: »

I really like it, it's very 'clean'. Is it Shopify?

Really like the products too.

Any sales yet?

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Trying to breeze through this quickly, so ignore the order here (it isn't done by importance), I'm just adding things as I spot them on the site.

Logo: At the moment, the logo is taking up far too much of the most valuable real estate on your site.

You either need to resize the logo so the height is reduced considerably (meaning the other 2/3rds of the top of the page isn't wasted) or else try and place something meaningful in that 2/3rds that adds value.

As others have commented on how much they like the 'clean' look of the site, I'd suggest reducing the size is probably the preferable option of the two there, but something certainly needs to be done with it. Possibly something that would benefit from a little A/B testing, but as traffic is low at the moment and there's no clear call to action on the page to measure against, it's a little early for that.

Navigation Menu: I'm referring to this as an issue with the navigation menu, which it is, but more fundamentally it's an issue with the site architecture.

Put simply, there's too many links there. More importantly, there's too many pages there full stop (given the similarity of the products, at least at first glance for someone that doesn't really 'know' them) even if they weren't being linked to.

I'd need a better understanding of your product (and more importantly how people shop/search for your product) to know exactly how you should address this. Hopefully you'll be able to do it intuitively with a few little nudges in the right direction.

Sit down for a minute with a pen and paper (mind mapping software if you're so inclined or even just mental notes) and figure out the most important pages on your site.

Some of these may (or may not) help:
What's the most important factor when choosing a product? I'd imagine it's size from the way the site is currently laid out (I'd have guessed material if I'm honest), but correct me if I'm wrong.
What's the most important secondary factor? I'd imagine material, but again open to correction.
What's the most important xxxx factor? (List out as many as you need to give the full range of products that you supply - things like the bespoke offerings could obviously be treated differently)

Figure out what information your users want quickly and easily, putting that up front where they can't miss it. From a quick glance you appear to have 24 products (taking the totals from both 24" and 51", perhaps this misses some?) and at least 41 individual URLs with which to access various subsets of those 24 products.

When it comes to search engines, that's a horrid situation for crawl efficiency, overall quality of your site (too much duplicate content and dispersion of link equity) and as a result you'll find it much tougher to rank those pages.

Forgetting about the SEO side of it (and the reason why your SEO suffers in situations like this), it makes your site difficult to navigate as a user. It took me quite a while to realise that the site was basically just offering me a single product (forgetting about the bespoke) with 3 options available: size, material and plaque.

The SEO side of it could be easily solved with a band aid fix (even without any changes) with simply selecting which pages are wanted to rank and correct employment of some canonical tags (telling the search engine that another 'version' of this page is the one that should rank and to basically ignore this individual URL). However, the user side of it is more important and directly related so I'd avoid simply going for the 'technical' SEO fix and instead rethinking some of those pages and the way the products are currently navigated. (If you want to dig into this topic in more depth, Google for articles relating to "Taxonomy")




There's also a major issue there with duplicate content... but that's directly related to the above so perhaps it's worth considering how you address one before saying too much on the other. Long story short, if something is worthy of having a unique URL it should (read MUST) have quality unique content on the page (and not just a unique mixture of which content is copy/pasted from elsewhere).

Personally I'd move the majority of the second row of links from the nav bar to the footer (it has less weighting in the eyes of the search engines and less likely to be clicked by users - so figure out which elements aren't as important and move them down).

Really, you're looking to make the users experience of arriving on your site, finding the exact product they need and purchasing it as simple as possible. You can call it UX (user experience design), you can call it CRO (conversion rate optimisation), or anything else you like, the bottom line is you're simply trying to remove the clutter (from duplication of nav links or irrelevant links to poor copy) and make the process as easy as possible.

Contact Us: Definitely provide a postal address (pretty sure that's a legal requirement to be honest) and I'd consider adding a landline number (easy to pick up a virtual landline from the likes of Goldfish for little cost if no actual landline available). Sometimes we do things we've seen elsewhere as we're too lazy/uncreative/etc to come up with something else. Sometimes providing information where it’s expected to be is essential to establish immediate trust and gain the confidence of the user to continue their journey.

You're looking to build trust, so all of these little things help. They'll also help when it comes to local search, so benefits to both rankings and user behaviour. (With that in mind, you should also include a privacy statement outlining what information is collected, how it's secured, etc etc.)

From a personal/subjective opinion, it looks a bit sterile and cold there. I imagine it's a relatively small business with only a handful of employees (or 1)? If so, don't try and hide that fact. The truth is, people like people. Get a picture up there, get your name and background up there, get up things that will build trust and show potential customers who they are putting their trust in. (The above goes for both the Contact and the About Us pages - on the about us, hyperlink the discussion of shipping to the shipping cost page).

Do you really need 3 email addresses? If you make a user have to make a decision, you increase the chance of them deciding not to bother doing anything and simply leaving. I'd strongly suggest reducing that down to a single email addy which should see an increase in users actually using it.

(Social links have been mentioned, but if you're not going to update them in the short term best to remove them [simply comment out the code and you can replace later])

While the point about providing an alternative to PayPal is a good one, and well worth considering, it's actually quite a bad user experience to display alternative payment logos on the site and then not accept them (I understand that most can be used via a PayPal guest account, but that's not how some [potentially vocal] users will see it). I'd remove the logos other than PayPal from the bottom of the page.


When it comes to the onpage SEO factors, the basics of this are very well documented across the web. I won't bore you with the details in one place as I'd simply be repeating what's available elsewhere. If you jump here (Google Webmaster Tools), here (Bing Webmaster Tools, specifically the SEO analyzer), here, here and here (a few random articles on ecommerce and optimisation [SEO or CRO]), you'll get a good feel for what you should be doing and a few examples of how to do it. If you've any specific questions on what you find there, fire it up here and someone (myself or others) will be happy to help.

You appear to have added this already, but only as an image file. The content of images isn't available for search engines to index and isn't available for users to search for as a result. Feel free to retain the image if you believe it presents the data in a nice way (personally I think it looks poor, is of a low quality and doesn't fit with the rest of the site), but do get the content up as normal text too.

tricky D wrote: »

I reckon there's a lot of work which needs be done on this.

First, the logo and strapline needs work, simplification mainly. I would remove the hands bit and the bit above the cross. I'd remove 'Recognise your Roots' (low relevance) and move the 'Grave Marking Crosses' into that space. I'd get someone to tidy the logo and type up too.

A lot of the text copy needs to be retreated and made a lot more snappy and savvy. Eg. most of homepage copy above the products could be removed. There's 3 paras there: the 1st could be just removed as it is fluff content with little value. The main points of the 2nd could be boiled down to snappy phrases like: Worldwide Shipping; Honour the Memory of Your Dearly Departed; and given treatment like an aside. Ideally you shouldn't need the 'Click on one of our most popular Grave Markers below to discover it's unique Irish features.' at all as it should be intuitive.

The treatment of the products needs a big overhaul. As PaulPinnacle says you basically (ingoring Bespoke for the moment) have one product with 3 variations: size, material and plaque. Trying to go through 24 pages with these variants is far too much/many and gets confusing due to the similarities. What would be much better would be to have it pitched as one product with 3 variables that the user can customise themselves. So instead of a user clicking through up to 24 pages with different combinations, they would have a single page with 3 options for size, material and plaque, selecting their combination with a refresh to the relevant image. Shopify has some scope for this with variants but I'm not sure about the refresh bit and pricing updating. KonFusion is likely to be the user who would know more about this.

Having to send the Engraving text by email as a separate process is less than ideal. There should be a textbox for this as part of the purchase process. The 'Add special instructions for your order...' could do this if you changed the text accordingly.

When I get to the PayPal page in the checkout, shipping doesn't appear to be included; it should at least be mentioned if it hasn't yet been calculated to mitigate against users getting the unpleasant price jump surprise which hurts conversion. Not sure if you have such options available with PP.

'Cancel and return to irishcelticcrosses@gmail.com.' on one of the PayPal pages isn't the right text.

The photos need to be fixed so that the crosses are not skewed as they are not properly horizontal and vertical and don't look so good as a result.

The typfacing needs a lot of work with better usage of sizing, indentation, colouring (it's almost all the same green to the point of blandness), positioning. But don't over do this.

A few other details which need fixing/attention:
On the homepage the text 'Bespoke Cross Making Service' at the bottom hasn't been properly linked.
Some email addresses are not linked up as mailtos.
The product image popups have no navigation.
The contact page could do with a form and perhaps even a map (though not really needed it adds a little bit more trust).
Add http://www.bereavementireland.com/ to your bereavement links.
Make the shipping table graphic into a text table.
Shipping times in the About Us page and Shipping page do not match.
Could get some happy customer feedback.

That's enoug fo the time being for you to consider.

gl