Honest website review please - I'm doing something wrong.

[jaccylee]

Really appreciate some feedback on my website. It's a Mrsite package which is due for renewal, I have had it for a year. I have only had 1 actual online sale through paypal, so my unique visitors isn't high. I had added a links page to generate more traffic, (but i'm not hot on SEO) or content analysis. I also know that I need to redo my pictures. I have seen some useful information on here about using macro settings on my camera, just need to give that a try.

Advertising would also be the next step, ukcraftwebsites is an obvious choice, but just not sure whether to give it another year or not.

I have sold pieces by direct contact, and recently received a commission, through the website, so thats good is suppose.

Good or bad feedback would be most appreciated.
thanks
Jackie.

[Cat'seyes]

Hi Jackie

I really like your site its easy to navigate. I maybe would have used the words Gallery of jewellery rather than Go Shopping but that is me.

I agree with you that your images are a bit dark and there is very little colour in them. I think that is something to do with your white balance. If the background you were taking against was white then its kind of "greyed" everything down and I think that is the problem.

Also maybe try taking the photographs closer as well as further away and try not to compress the images to far so that the pixelate.

Having said all that I think your site is great and very easy to navigate. Well done.

[jaccylee]

Thank you Cat's Eye,
I work full time, so the only chance to take photos is at the weekend to get the natural light, and I have a tendency to rush, and take some quickly, and then put them on the website, and then carry on with the housework.

I will try to spend more time experimenting and not rushing.
thanks
jackie

[hdflred]

OK my thoughts are this:-

The website is fine, very nice, however I think you have identified some points yourself. The photos could be better, and I also don't like the watermark you have running over the close ups, If I click a close up it''s because I want to see more of a product not less. Have you had your designs copied before? I was just wondering why you had added that.

You truely have some lovely jewellery, I would think the main problem is not enough people are seeing it, I would think your next task is to do some SEO and self promotion to raise awareness, I can't think of any other reason why people wouldn't buy from you.

You have masses of outbound links, do you have the same ammount of links coming back to you?

[ThE_SeeKeR]

how much is it per year with mrsite, as im sure theres other alternatives that are either cheaper or if you spend a little more you earn more?

[jaccylee]

Hi Harriet,
mrsite gives you the option to add a watermark, but I think you are right, and will take them off.
If I do a search on my name, it appears quite a few times, so yes, I have got quite a few links too. I did spend some time requesting link exchanges.
thank you for your comments
jackie

[just sally]

hi,
just had a look at your website, it looks great apart from the pic`ts but you know that already. can`t think why you are not selling as your jewellery is lovely.
whitch mrsite did you opt for?
sally

[matt.chatterley]

Hi Jackie,

This is a tricky one really - do you have any sort of visitor monitoring (e.g. Google Analytics, as per other threads)?

If so, the first thing is to try and work out which problem best fits your current predicament:

1. Very few of my visitors buy something (under 2%)

2. A reasonable proportion of my visitors buy something (over 2%), but I need to increase my traffic to build up my turnover.

It sounds to me as if you are probably in bracket #1 - in which case I'm not sure I would advocate spending money on advertising, etc.

Improving traffic through "natural" SEO is always worthwhile (one-off expense for the traffic, be that monetary or in terms of time spent on the site - although it requires some monitoring).

On the SEO front, would need a lot more information to advise - I can give you one example I looked at - "bridal jewellery" - this is a niche search phrase, which seems to attact approx 30,000 searches a month according to Google. It is also the title of one of your categories, and you have some nice pieces in there. However, you don't rank anywhere on the first 15 pages (thats as far as I looked) - there are only 230,000 UK search results and 600,000 "web" search results, so a good ranking here is achievable with some work.

Purely an example!

By the way:

You seem to have what I think is a common Mr-Site-esque image problem - the images are huge, and scaled by the HTML - try reducing (scaling down ) the images in an image editor such as GIMP, PhotoShop, etc - this should make the pages load a bit faster. They are >2000 pixels wide at the mo, and should be ~200px wide!

Back to the plot. You need a plan of action. How much is your MrSite renewal? I'll bet you it's cheaper than most other services out there (I'm not even going to waggle our pricelist around!).

You need to come up with a short plan, example below - I won't go into specifics, else this will be a monster post!

1. Figure out how many hits you get a day, and from where.

2. Work out what percentage convert (turn into a sale).

3. If traffic is under 30-40 unique hits a day, do some work on SEO for a few niche keywords which you think will attract targetted customers (e.g. bridal jewellery). At this sort of level, you should make 2-3 sales a week.

If <2% Convert, you need to change the look and feel of your site, until your conversions improve. There is a lot of reading material out there, but it's all to do with building customer trust, and encouraging them to buy (while ensuring there is nothing which puts them off).

Once you have achieved a good "base" conversion rate, you can start improving traffic:

4. Natural SEO. Lots of tips here, and on the web!
5. Budget/Paid for advertising - as you suggest - some of these deals are great value
6. Consider pay-per-click. Once you have a good estimated conversion rate, you can calculate return on investment for each £ of advertising and use it as a tool.

Good luck!

[samigail]

I'm not too great at website stuff either
I liked the colours etc of your website, everything loaded really well.
Matt's advice seems fab and some of the points he makes I need to think about for my own website
The only thing that distracted me on your website is the diamond shaped bullet points down the left hand side. They have the effect of twirling round - this kept my eye coming back to them which took my vision away from the jewellry pictures.
It might just be me - I'm easily distracted!

[matt.chatterley]

I'm not too great at website stuff either
I liked the colours etc of your website, everything loaded really well.
Matt's advice seems fab and some of the points he makes I need to think about for my own website
The only thing that distracted me on your website is the diamond shaped bullet points down the left hand side. They have the effect of twirling round - this kept my eye coming back to them which took my vision away from the jewellry pictures.
It might just be me - I'm easily distracted!

Oo, thats a good point which I missed. Generally when you want to try and sell something to someone, moving "things" are considered bad - unless you want people to be looking at whatever is moving (e.g. "Page is updating!" animations).

Because as you say - they draw the eye.

[jaccylee]

Oh thank you for your comments, tried to post a reply yesterday, but somehow lost the info.

I did not get time to update my pics, but have taken the watermarks off as suggested. Also removed the twirling diamond bullet points, which does make it look better.

I'm using mrsite pro, I originally bought the takeaway package for £25, and then upgraded to mrsite pro later on in the year to get some stat info. I can see the number of unique visitors, and where my visitors are coming from, and what browser they are using. Also signed up to webmaster tools, to make sure that my site is verified. but as to google analytics - way above my head, did not know how to start a test, so haven't got round to doing more analysing.

Matt - thank you for the detailed info, a lot to take on board, and it will take me some time to work on seo. Also, my keywords need updating, mrsite shows me that I have words like 'extender chain' or 'seed beads' as keywords, this isn't much help for google search. Do I put keywords in the description of the item, or just in the title paragraph of the header page?

Anyway, just to let you all know, that I really appreciate your feedback, and at £69 to renew for another year, and it little advertising, things should look better this year.

thanks
Jackie

[matt.chatterley]

Hi Jackie,

Keywords and generally search tuning is oft-discussed here, so I'll be really brief - try searching around the forums for some SEO tips (or drop me a line off the thread).

1. Work out what you want people to search for when they find you. Make a list of approximately 10 searches and try them yourself. Make a note of how many competitors there are (how many results).

2. Although not vital, meta keywords (mr site keywords) is somewhere to start - put the searches you've decided on in there, e.g. jewellery, bridal jewellery, wedding earrings - whatever they are.

3. Edit the meta description tag (page description tag) to be a nice human-readable line of text for each page. Try to keep it under 120ish characters, and remember that this is often what the search engine will show to searchers.

4. Make sure that your chosen search phrases (keywords) show up naturally in the text of your page(s) - ideally in links.

5. Get as many links to your site as possible - ideally some of these will use those words as the link text.

^^ By no means exhaustive, just somewhere to start..

Good luck!

[silverjewelleryworkshop]

Sorry, I'm late putting my "two penneth" into this but I've just joined the forum today.
I agree with all the comments about SEO as I've just designed my site. A good option when optimising your site is an optimisation program; I use one called IBP. Ok you do have to pay for it (about £200) but it is an invaluable tool if you want high rankings; it will print a detailed report of all on and off site factors which may affect your ranking and more importantly, give you advice on how to change things. You can even download a free demo version for 30 days to see if you like it.
love your designs and hope you do well.