Tell me what you think

[sots]

Hi All,

My business startup Star of the story - http://www.starofthestory.co.uk sells personalised story books. Personalised books make ideal gifts - simply enter the childs name and they appear throughout the story.

The site has been live for about 4 weeks. Book sales are going well we we are getting good feedback. But, i wanted to take a step back to see if we could improve.

Could you spare a few minutes to help. Please visit my site and tell me what you think. I must say i am not a seasoned actinic developer but i am happy with what i have done so far - i would like advice on how i can improve though.

Does the layout look good, do the images work, do the links work, do you like the products, can you navigate ok.

I appreciate all feedback recieved either to this post or to my email address
webmaster@starofthestoryDOTcoDOTuk

Thanks.

[David@MPL]

Reaching Us If you need to reach us, please email us using the link on the store page, alternatively, you can call on 0870 042 3757 (International +44 0870 042 3757 ) or fax us on or write to us at PO Box 481 Eastleigh Hampshire SO50 0AW United Kingdom

Do 0870 numbers work from abroad, I didn't think they did. Normally you see a +44 and then a normal geographic number.

[jont]

Hi Phil,

great concept for a site and one that lends itself perfectly to the internet. Couple of things that stand out and you may wish to consider....

May be worth making a bigger play of the personalised nature of the book - this is not overly obvious from the site and most is in text ... may be a montage image of a personalised book with text and arrow saying "your childs name here" or something like that.

The images on the pages are quite low resolution and highly compressed - as the image count per page is very low may be worth using higher quality images with less compression to really sell and promote the products.

Some of the products are very difficult to drill down to .. Toy Story for example is shown on the homepage at hte bottom but needs far too many clicks to get through to it ... may be worth using more top level sections and moving things upwards.

Are all the personalised fields required? If they are optional may be worth making a note of this.

I run a site with a section of personalised products and this is the area receiving the most email questions - I introduced an FAQ page and this dropped the emails to a fraction and increased the conversion rates - may be worth introducing to let people know how it is done, the quality of the print, what is invloved, how they do it, spelling mistakes etc etc... anything to make the conversion and close the sale.

Jont

[feemish]

Hi,

First impression is of that big white space under the 'star of the story' image.
Not too keen on that, maybe try a longer image to fill in the space ?
First impressions are the most important, the homepage does seem a bit 'empty'

http://www.arka-shop.co.uk

[NormanRouxel]

Nice to see my Multi Other Info prompt in use. Don't forget it's donationware. You can configure this to limit the size of the displayed field, limit the # of characters entered per field, make some fields optional and some mandatory.

It might be an idea to do a bit of handholding for your customers. Show them (perhaps via a popup page) an example of a completed form and a fragment of the personalised story.

[RuralWeb]

Nice reminder there Norm - I owe you some more cash:)

[jont]

Norman - talking of the "Other Info Prompt" I know you made some headway into the v8 conversion - are you taking this through to an actual release?

Add me to the list of willing purchasers for a v8 implementation.

[sots]

Hi All,

Many thanks for all your feedback. I have made a few change and will make a few more soon.

For anyone interested i have created a discount code (sots10) which will give a 10% discount on the 'Princess Stories' range. We have got a great promotion for xmas (Rudolph book and cudly toy).

Thanks...

[jont]

Hi Phil - may be worth posting the discount on this thread http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=24690 there is a common use of ACTFORUM5, ACTFORUM10 etc for the coupon codes to help track where they are coming from and keep it simple for us meagre Actinicers