I am fairly new to this forum and set up my e commerce site http://www.aluxurygift4you.com on 1 September 2007 with an E Commerce provider but moved to a different E Commerce provider -EKM Powershop at the end of November who designed me a better looking site. I am not an SEO expert and this is my first involvement with an E Commerce site. Initially following the move to EKM most of my pages were not indexed by Google so I missed the Christmas rush but now about 130 of 170 pages are indexed so that seems to be heading in the right direction. I really would appreciate the views and comments of as many of you as possible about all aspects of my site -both positive and negative feedback is welcomed. I have spent some time reading many of the threads and look forward to being an active forum member. Thank You Alan Hope
Seems good, but my advise don't use your site name everywhere... Like Luxury for and all.. I mean it kinda gets rid of the professional touch. Otherwise its quite good. And hey Dude, please read the descriptions of sections on each Board. This is surely not the right place to post this.
Welcome to the forum and you're UK based like me, cool. I checked your website as a consumer and it looks nice; I think the grey colour is a bit dull but otherwise, it looks ok from what I've seen. I viewed the page source for some of the pages and it seems to have your keywords inserted ok except the about us page...there are no meta data there.....instead where your keywords and description should be, it says: <META name="description" content="You can put information in here about your"> <META name="keywords" content="information, "> Also with valentine coming up, have you started promoting your products to UK based magazines and websites? Don't you think these will be great valentine day gifts? Just an idea.
The layout of the items doesn't work well. The descriptions are too long for that format and just make things look strange - I'd consider either shortening them or moving them below the thumbnail. The Details and Purchase buttons are quite small too, you could probably do with making them a little more enticing. The combination of the layout of the items, the large header area and the free delivery graphic result in your item's thumbnails being pushed partially below the fold, when they should be made far more prominent as that's the area of the site that you want people to be drawn to and ultimate click and buy. The two greys on the left nav are quite similar too, possibly change the text on the the nav to white so that they show up a bit more.
I like your website for 3 main things 1) Very nice colors 2) Organized 3) Very fast server, pages and images load very fast
Not too bad from a presentation standpoint, a bit plain and blocky... The greys are a bit too low contrast to each-other - in particular the dark grey on light grey text in the sidebar is near illegible. The baby sized text on the descriptions isn't all that great, and oddities in the spacings also make it hard to tell if it's just rendering errors, or if it's supposed to look like that. The inconsistant styling between the 'detail' and 'purchase' buttons is also distracting, again making them look more like rendering error - not that I would be using images for EITHER of those in the first place. The page also does not seem to degrade gracefully with images off. One look at the code - GAH. Doctype and HTML tag REVERSED (welcome to hacking around quirks mode in IE), CSS still inlined, table based layout slow as hell to load, completely absurd and redundant use of presentational tags, 31k of HTML for 1.3k of actual CONTENT, 71 validation errors - I just hope that whoever you got that design from didn't rape your wallet too badly as it's fairly apparant that their HTML/CSS skills are stuck in 1997. I almost spit up my soda when I saw this: <FONT FACE="arial" SIZE=2 COLOR="DARKRED"><br> </FONT><FONT FACE="arial" SIZE=2><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> Code (markup): Last time I saw code that bad it was 2001 and I was rewriting a 1998 website designed in this pile of crap called 'visual page pro'. Some image optimizations wouldn't hurt either - at 235k that sucker is PAINFUL to watch load - I don't even want to THINK about what dialup users would see. The 'big' offender is imagemagic.jpg - you've got a full on 640x480 145k image being used where you should likely have a 256x192 6k image. lg.jpg and delivery(1).jpg are no winners either, both of those being the wrong image format for what they are AND easily five to ten times the size that should be needed. I'm also seeing wildly different layouts across browsers - firefux in particular seems to really dislike the page when compared to Opera and IE... So... yeah, I'd say there's some work to do. Because he's running an actual business with a product that generates REAL revenue, instead of some link whore advertising bullshit? That would be my guess. When selling products through a website, advertising OTHER PEOPLE'S PRODUCTS makes next to zero sense. But then, I consider people who slap adverts everywhere to have next to zero ACTUALsense... I have 99.99% of advertising blocked on my computer in the first place since I trust most sleazeball advertising ****'s about as far as I could throw Mabel/Viscera/Big Daddy V - I sure as hell wouldn't want to link their crap code into my sites Besides, isn't this whole "everything can be paid for through advertising" rubbish the EXACT SAME bull that led to the demise of the free dialup services and a major contributor to the original dotcom bust? Learning nothing from the past I see - of course, it just proves the old joke: "Sophisticated internet investor - will give money for vague promises"