Critique request: Mari-Len.com

I thought I had requested a review in here, but I guess I was wrong. In any case, please check out my site at http:/www.mari-len.com and let me know what you think. Thanks!

 

wel it is nice and simple, but work a little on the title it seems to be old fashioned...u know it is centered...any way it is good

 

I liked the site Nocholas!

Suggestions (which I'm absolutely unqualified to give):

1. Move the text in the well "Thank you for shopping at. . . " somewhere else and replace it with the pitctures of the of your inventory. Get their attention with what they want to buy! The dresses are nice.

2. Move the "Shopping Resoruces" to a links/partners page (unless you have to have them here). It's a distraction and could cause you to lose visitors.

3. Display more test on the items in the item summary pages: http://www.mari-len.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=4

4. If you are selling items at a discount, say so. . .

5. I would add a "special offers" section with items that are on sale or include shipping or . . . .

6. My browser displays a "done but with errors on the page" message at the bottom of the browser window - I'm using MS IE 6.x with XP/SP2.

7. You need an "about us" and a "privacy policy" section. Let people know who they are dealing with and what you are going to do with their information.

8. And my final suggestion is to join Shawn's coop ad network (this would be a great chance for me to get some referral weight but it seems a little cheezzy). You can find references here on the forum.

Hope this helps!

Good luck!

-jay

 

Ok, I was on the coop network but I got a lot of advice from different quarters not to have any ads at all on an ecommerce site. It kind of made sense, so I got rid of that, the adsense stuff I had up, as well as the coop and some other stuff as well. To tell you the truth I like the coop idea a lot, but it really wasn't doing anything for me. I don't have enough PR or traffic yet to really make it worthwhile for me to have something like that on my pages.

As far as that error you talked about goes I'm not sure. I use firefox 1.0. I tested in IE and Netscape and couldn't reproduce the error. There shouldn't be anything going on down there that would return an error anyway.

We don't have an "about us" page yet, which I should probably do, but our privacy policy is liked to right there in the information box just below the "shopping resources" box. Those shopping resources links are all directories and stuff like that. I put them there to make sure I get linked well in them. I'm going to be doing an audit of that be the end of the week. I'll tell you this though, out of all the links there only a few of them have sent me back any traffice. If I don't have a link in any of them those guys are gone.

As for the top of the page I have plans for that. The text blurb there above the category listing graphics is temporary. I'm not sure what I'm going to put in there. A montage of some of our product is not a bad idea, but I hesitate to try to do it myself as I really stink at graphics. I have to do something there though.

Nick

 

Nicholas,

The "shopping resources" are ads. If you have to have them, move them below your footer.

My oversite on the privacy policy - I'm not used to looking for it in the lefthand nav-bar

In regards to the coop, also put the links below your footer (don't use banners, just text links) . Not sure what counsel you got on this but I would love to hear it in case I'm mistaken on the benefits or problems.

PM me your email address and I'll send you the screenshot attachments with the error messages.

Take care and good luck!

-jay

 

I will be doing something with the links, I'm not sure I like the way they look there anyway. Don't think anything bad about the coop. It's an excellent idea and I plan to use it on some other projects I'm working on. I just don't think it's the right idea for this particular site. In fact, I probably won't be doing any kind of advertising of anything I'm not selling anywhere at all on the site except for on my links page. The problem I have is at the moment my site is only pulling about 50 uniques a day. That's not going to show up anywhere even as a blip, so the coop, or anyone else, isn't going to do much for me at this point. I'm just not getting enough weight in the system to show my ad enough to matter.

By the way, I did PM you with my email. I would like to see those errors.

Nick

 

Ok, I've made quite a number of changes to the site based on advise recieved here and elsewhere. Check it out and let me know what you think of the new look.