Hi DPers, I've been working on a new site for about two months at this point. It's a vertical shopping site focused on shoes. I realize that this is a competitive niche! That just means it will take more time and patience. At this point, Google has about 62,000 of the pages listed in my sitemap and some long tail searches are trickling in. Can you take a look and let me know what you think of the site? You guys know your stuff and your feedback would be very welcome. It's the shoe related link in my sig. That leads to a special page focused on one type of shoe. Thanks in advance!
I have seen this a lot but I don't really understand. When you are selling shoes, why do you want to put google adsense there? Aren't you making your leads go away by making them click on the ads? I think you are potentially losing the revenue generated by the sale, whenever you get a click on the google ad block you have. If I ever have a product selling website, I doubt I'll put up google adsense there. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks supercar, you are right about that and you sound a lot like my wife. In the past I've run a hugely successful site which made its primary money from affiliate sales but google adsense provided a nice addition. The goal is that when a user arrives at the site, there is something there that catches their eye, if it's a particular shoe, fantastic, if it is something provided in a google ad, well, that's okay too, as long as they find something of value.
Thank you! Yes, it sure is slow. The nice thing about using a CMS like Drupal with some custom hacks is that you can make something happen quickly, the downside is speed can sometimes be an issue. I'm working out some caching issues to speed things up and also priming the cache. There are over 300,000 shoes in the DB, which isn't a ton but we are caching the images to our server to have better control and reduce the number of different hosts involved.
Yes, it is very slow. One of the things that slows it down is the way we are handling the product images. Basically when a page loads that includes product images, if we have not yet downloaded those images, we curl them from the advertisers site and store them locally. So pages with products that we have not yet locally cached the images are slow. I'm working on solving that by basically crawling the site to hit the pages, at least those linked from the top level to ensure that we have the images. I'm also working on tuning some of the queries to speed things up. If anybody has any tips on how to speed up drupal, I'd love to find out about them. The site is running on a dedicated server with two quad core processors and 6 gig of RAM. It should not be slow. I'm also using APC to speed up the php. Any performance tips would be very, very welcome!
I like the overall shoe-idiot conception but it's not reflected in design at all. Logo is out of date, usability is not at a high level (it doesn't look like a large shop). 1st of all you should reconsider blocks location (and I am not talking about Adsense here) and use of space.
It is a very nice site :'Michael Jordan Shoes ' about shoes. There are lot of links leading to a lot of shoe maker's sites. Hope that this will do a good business.
Firstly, the pictures of the shoes are too small and of low quality, make me .PNG images so they blend into the template design. For me, it looks very unprofessional, it would cost under £100 to get a professional and slick looking website.
I think you're site could use a lot of work. The logo is terrible and the site is very user unfriendly. The 'shoe store' navigation should be above the fold of the page.