A quick note to say thank you. Your words have been inspiring and your tips very usefull. It has been very appreciated. These forums are a great source of help!
Best regards!
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A quick note to say thank you. Your words have been inspiring and your tips very usefull. It has been very appreciated. These forums are a great source of help!
Best regards!
After taking your comments and applying them to our site we have noticed a steady climb of traffic, which is great! Thank you. But little are converting to sales, anyone know some tricks or tips to convert into sales.
Online surveys?I don't like the idea of bugging potential customers to why they are not buying or having a "pop up survey" because they are annoying as all get out but has anyone had success with them? or find them usefull?
Any comments would be appreciated?
BigDoorArt, Are you still looking for feedback?
I just so happened to take a look at this. One thing I noticed is that it is a month after the posts and the site has not changed.
I attended a 1-day seminar from Edward Tufte and it opened my eyes into the 'Visual Presentation of Data.' Now, at first, that doesn't seem applicable here since you sell art, not data. However, one thing that Tufte did was measure the size of a graph/table, etc. and calculate the amount of information presented per square inch. This struck me as an awesome way to evaluate the effectiveness of any presentation...how much of it is fluff and how much of it is the INFORMATION!? Your site is about ART, not 'blue-on-gray grid.' Only 5% of your site's homepage is dedicated to ART!
In addition, the first thing you see at the top is a Keyword search bar. Do you really have that much art? I would put the search bar on the bottom of the page or on successive pages (i.e., when a user clicks on a category and gets page 1 of 57 pages...that's when a seach bar springs onto the page...when the customer realizes that he needs to narrow it down further.) Also, the top 40% of your page is not art. Put some art up near the top in case users have low resolution and a million extra 'toolbars' tacked onto their browsers. Make sure that they don't have to scroll to see some of your art.
Put the best work you have right on the front page in BIG size. (Keep the image size low through proper web optimization.) It's OK to have one big file, but not many. Put a good price on it too, right on the front page...with a 'add to cart' icon so they know immediately that they can buy online. Would it be a bad thing? No! It would become your best seller and you would have customers who will come back for more when you have offered good customer service. This is what they tell authors to do, effectively, if your chapter 14 is awesome, then figure out how to re-write the story to put your that chapter right up front or else the evaluators at the publishing houses will stop reading before they get to chapter 14. That's a lot harder to do than moving a product to your home page...
I saw that one of the recommendations was to create a category list of types of art. I recommend this too.
Your font is too small for my eyes and contrasts bad (white on light blue?) I can't Ctrl-Middle-Mouse-Wheel scroll on it either, which measns that I am stuck with this impossible to see font. Make it bigger by default and use the style that allows the users to change it's size for their eyes. Your bottom nav menu on your gallery page already does this, so take a look at that code for an idea how to do this.
Let me know if this has been helpful. If you post, I will get an e-mail.
-David.
Dunno bout anyone else's reaction, but I think that may be the most useful site review I've seen.
Wow! Thanks for that JPnyc! Your profile says 'Adiministrator.' Does that mean that this is your professional opinion? ;-)
It means I'm an administrator of the Online Communities that Jupitermedia publishes but it doesn't mean I'm a de facto expert on owning or running an online or small business. And you're welcome. That was an incisive, direct appraisal and all of it backed up with sound reasoning. I sure got something out of it.:D
Your site image looks great. I found it difficult to see the images and know what I would be buying though. You have received great help on this thread. If you would like to talk to someone, I work for Kendall & Associates, which specializes in an ecommerce system. Please give a call if you are interested. 330.920.6185 or check out the website: www.kendallinc.com.
As much as the tips and suggestions are great, I have come to the conclusion....you can't create a website that will be perfect for everyones computer settings.
The site has changed considerably since the first posting, 85% of the copy has been reworked. We have addressed several main issues that arose from this posting. Unfortunatley you won't be able to see what the site used to look like since it's been updated.
It has been a rather eye opening experience. This has been a great posting as a lot of fantastic comments have been brought up and a lot of change has come from it. We'll continue to take note of your comments and may implement the ones that will make the greatest impact. Thanks again.
Well you can, but it's a major pain to do. I have built one site that will display exactly the same at every resolution and screen size. In fact, it will change if you just resize your browser window. But this requires that the browser have javascript enabled.