Site Appeal

[laurie45]

Hi

A happy new year to you all.

I am looking for some feedback as to my sites appeal. It has been up and running for about 10 months now, but sales are slow at present.
I had to swop Optimisation companies after 6 months due to poor optimisation by them, but it still seems slowwith the new company.
Also i would appreciate any advice on pay per click to enhance my google ratings.

Laurie

www.feedem.co.uk

[leehack]

Do we have to guess the url?

[chris ashdown]

Why did you swap the SEO companies? did they do any good and who were they

Most people agree that Actinic is quite good at SEO in its own straight from the box if you follow their guidelines

You have a large number of compeditors so that does not help

Prehapse a small amount of advertising on Google Adwords might help, though keep the maximum daily amount to what you can afford and try to keep in the first 1-6 positions for your keywords

I would suggest your money may be spent better reading up on SEO rather than pay someone else to do it unless you are positive they can help, check their record out with their exsisting customers

If you are working with Google adwords you get access to Google Analytics which shows all the marketing info you are likely to need

[RobSollars]

Just a couple of things I noticed at a glance:

Your titles aren't refined based on your keywords. It's really important for your page titles to be relevant to the content of your page and to contain your important keywords to raise the profile of each page in your site. You should try to avoid generic terms and focus on the words that people will be searching for.

Your pages are also quite large - this page (http://www.feedem.co.uk/acatalog/Basic_Products.html) is a whopping 559 kb in size! To give you a break down, 534 kb of that is images. Your logo alone is 74 kb, most likely due to it being a .gif whereas a .jpg would be a more suitable format. 15 kb is a reasonable maximum to aim for for images, so maybe try optimising your photos a little more to get the size down.

Tackling these two problems will be a good start to increasing your site's profile and conversion rates. Finding a good, reliable SEO will definitely be worthwhile. Beware of the cowboys with their promises of catapulting you to the top of Google in no time at all - the only way to get good listings is through hard work. It will take time, but if you persevere, it will be worthwhile.
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[RuralWeb]

I had to swop Optimisation companies after 6 months due to poor optimisation by them, but it still seems slowwith the new company Excuse me for being blunt but I can see no evidence of optimisation of your site - it is standard out the box Actinic.

The reason you have no organic results is that all your pages are in the supplimental results with google ie not available for search results. This is due to several factors which I am sure your SEO company can tell you - if they cannot then as advised in a previous post get rid of them and do it yourself - plenty of information on the forum.

[Luddite]

Your logo alone is 74 kb, most likely due to it being a .gif whereas a .jpg would be a more suitable format.I've read elsewhere on this community that gifs are better - Is there a definitive answer to this or is it horses for courses?

[fleetwood]

I've read elsewhere on this community that gifs are better - Is there a definitive answer to this or is it horses for courses?

Not a hard and fast rule, but generally:
Gifs for flat colour, Jpgs for photographic images

Gifs tend to produce slightly smaller files too.

[los_design]

As an addition, if you are using an image that you feel cannot be optimised any further by compression, why not try slicing it up. After all, 10 files of 7kb will load faster than 1 file of 74kb IMHO.

Also, wen using images on a store page, irrespective of the growth of broadband, try to optimise as much as possible. Aim for less than 5kb per image if using more than 5 per page, one rule we advise is reduce the image size pro rata depending on the number you wish to use (and of course increase when using less).

Effects to text and added images imported in will all inflate image size. Try to flatten and optmises every step of the way. Every mb you can squeeze out of the users connection counts :D

[RobSollars]

I've read elsewhere on this community that gifs are better - Is there a definitive answer to this or is it horses for courses?

As fleetwood quite rightly says, there's no absolute on this. Gifs produce vector images, so they are ideal for images where there are large blocks of colour. They are awful for images where there's a lot of fine detail, and will generally make gradients look horrible. Gifs also have formats that allow transparency and animation, although the former is the much more useful feature. PNGs are also good for vector images, but generally produce larger files than a gif would. The advantage of PNGs is that decent browsers allow you to do interesting things like translucency.

The JPEG format is designed specifically for photos and will result in much smaller files where there's a lot of fine detail. The compression is scalable too, so you can tweak the quality of them and arrive at some sort of nice medium between quality and size. Gifs don't allow this, instead forcing you to constrain your palette to optimise the image.

The best thing to do is experiment. Fireworks has some pretty excellent methods of comparing different image formats (try the two-up and four-up views) and I'm pretty sure Photoshop has something similar.

Hope that's of some use.
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[los_design]

Hi

A happy new year to you all.

I am looking for some feedback as to my sites appeal. It has been up and running for about 10 months now, but sales are slow at present.
I had to swop Optimisation companies after 6 months due to poor optimisation by them, but it still seems slowwith the new company.
Also i would appreciate any advice on pay per click to enhance my google ratings.

Laurie

www.feedem.co.uk

Hi Laurie,

on the sites appeal to search engines, I am with Malcolm on this one. Your description ranks an average 75% on SEO track checks (internal to LOS others may vary), too many keywords in your meta, no robot file nor author tag, page titles are not optimised very well at all, keyword density for your main phrases is 1.17% which is low and your site map takes forever to load, me thinks the gbot would go and get a cuppa before indexing this vital page. Whoever SEO'd this site will not be around for a long time IMHO.

As for general appeal, sorry to be blunt but unless I knew you, had used you before or you were the only one supplying what I was after, your first 8 seconds would not grab me and I would be off.

Home page has too much text, image presentation needs work, banner needs a major rethink and that is all I was inclined to view.

With some rethinking applied to this site, I feel you could attack a very competitive niche in a confident manner. But not as it stands now. As stated, sorry for the bluntness, but joe public will not comment when stopping by, he will just see what we see and leave.

Spend nowt on advertising until you are happy with the site.

Good luck.

[jont]

Gifs produce vector images

I always thought vector formats allowed the scaling of images with no loss of quality due to the vector co-ordinates being used as reference points so no jaggies on lines (EPS, Illustrator formats etc)... if you scale a GIF image the lines will pixellate.. or am I off the point (as usual) ??

[jont]

As for the OP I would take a look at the presentation of the site - to me it comes across as being - and there is no easy way of saying this - hobbyist - with the layout and especially the graphics in the banner and the navigation buttons. No offense meant, just how it comes over to me.

10 months is still very young for a new website for natural listings and you could still be experiencing the Google sandbox phenomenon to a certain extent on some of your pages

[RobSollars]

I always thought vector formats allowed the scaling of images with no loss of quality due to the vector co-ordinates being used as reference points so no jaggies on lines (EPS, Illustrator formats etc)... if you scale a GIF image the lines will pixellate.. or am I off the point (as usual) ??

Hey jont.

The advantage of vector image formats (such as gifs) is that you can zoom in on them with no reduction of quality because they contain information on how the lines should be drawn rather than pixel-specific information (as you rightly say). Jpegs and other bitmap formats work differently because they contain information about the image's actual pixel composition, so zooming causing them to pixelate and look ugly. This is why gifs are poorly suited to photos: the photo ends up being comprised of loads and loads of vectors, creating a hugely bloated image.

Jpegs can be scaled in terms of quality. You can specify exactly how much compression you want, from lossless down to a blurry mess. The more compression you add, the more artefacts you end up with and the smaller the file will turn out. Gifs don't offer this: the only way you can alter their size is to constrain your colour palette (so less information needs to be stored). There's also some stuff about dithering but I really only have a rudimentary knowledge on the whole subject so I'll stop blathering now :)
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[chris ashdown]

I agree with you Jonty

We are actually changing our JPg's to Giff's as we are removing the backgrounds around the models to make more impact on the actual garment with transparancy around the model

There is a marked reduction in quality but I thing this is acceptable in our case by the better empasis on the garments and although you can colour match the background in jpg's its a lot more time consuming rather that transparant background

It's a long process though cutting the backgrounds out and as ever a compromise in time on levels of edges remaining especially around the hair

If you all take out coverage for breakage I will put my ugly mug up soon if I can get a camera to stand up to it

[jont]

Hi Rob,

I was not aware that GIF was a vector format though - just a way of saving without lossless compression, transparency and animation. If you open any GIF file and resize it will become pixellated in my experience just as a JPEG will.

EPS, AI, SVG, CDR files are vector as you can open the file and scale to say 500% and they will not lose any quality.

Have done a quick search and could find no reference to GIF being a vector format - if you know of anywhere I would love to see and read (it's a quiet day at work)

[chris ashdown]

Rob

I think you are wrong with Giffs being Vector look here for a full list of formats

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_file_format

[jont]

and here for a listing of extensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vector_graphics_markup_languages

[leehack]

I would echo alot of the comments already mentioned. It may be hard to take criticism when alot of effort has been put in, however you have to ask yourself do i want to be patted on the back or do i want a successful and thriving website.

Sometimes im in the mood to type and i did start a review. After a few minutes i realised that there is so much that i would change, that it was not sensible to start a post detailing these points.

I would recommend employing a professional to sort the site out for you, whatever this costs you will become insignificant once your website takes off and you will not look back. If you do not have the money to do this, then take a look at previous site reviews in this forum, a large percentage of the points raised in these posts will also apply to your site.

Take a look at some thriving Actinic websites and see what they are doing and what you are not. There is never a nice way of saying that things are awful, so pointless trying to be sensitive. What i can guarantee is if you work hard or employ the correct person, your website will take off.

Good luck.

[Hendrik]

I am sure GIF is not a vector based image.

There is a neat little package called SmartSaver Pro from Ulead that I have used for many years (I think it costs around £30) which has a number of features, but the one I use it exclusively for is image optimisation - you get your original on the left, the compressed image on the right, and you can then adjust the file size in a number of clever ways, always seeing the exact result you will get. Handles JPEG, GIF and also PNG I believe. It means you can squeeze the image down to the absolute minimum file size, at a quality that you are still happy with.

Every image I post to the web goes via this neat little utility.

Hendrik

[RuralWeb]

Before vector-based graphics can be used on the web, they must be converted to a bitmapped file such as JPEG or GIF

[jont]

converted to a bitmapped file such as JPEG or GIF

Indeed - which is a one-way and permanent process - you are not able to import a GIF back into a vector program and adjust the co-ordinates as these have been lost in the conversion.

There are some vector formats availble for websites but these often require either / and compatible browsers and often a 3rd party plug-in .. not great for the majority of sites but handy if you are in a specialist field. 3d site camera walkthoughs are a typical example.

[RobSollars]

I'm wrong very often, and this is one of those occasions.
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