Site review

[jxm28788]

I would be grateful if you could take a look at my website (launched last week) and let me know what you think...

www.LowCarbGoodies.co.uk

Do you have any suggestions on how to make it look more professional? I've been taking a look at some of the other actinic sites mentioned in recent posts and they look much more polished.

I've tried to keep it as clutter free and simple as possible, as I think my target customers will quite often be newish users as opposed to veteran surfers. I've linked the logo and 'enter store' text to the products page as I don't think it was entirely obvious where users should go from the home page.

Any other comments and suggestions would also be welcome - it's hard to be objective when you've spent so long building it yourself...

[Jan]

The layout looks really good - I like the way you have offered quantities price breaks with the special offer products after each product. The only thing that I would suggest is to try the front page out with two columns rather than one - that gets more pictures shown initially, it might not work but it would be worth a try (if of course you haven't aready).

The content is a bit variable - it is all good but in some places you have included composition details (eg. kcals etc) and others not, if I was buying this as a dieter I would like to know exactly what was in it. Also you do not say which products are suitable for vegetarians.

I wasn't really sure what 'low carb goodies' were for until I saw the reference to the Atkins diet in the about us page so it might be worth adding a 'what are low carb goodies' section into the brochure or catalog.

As a shopper I would be put off by the £5 postage, it seems like quite a lot - having said that it is not that different to the supermarket delivery charges and you are selling products that are reasonably hard to come by in the shops.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Just a couple of comments

1 I feel the site would look better if you had a well designed logo instead of the title/text at present

2 If you insert this little piece of code immediately after the NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTQUANTITY

<input class="q_dec_button" type=button value="-" onClick="javascript:this.form.elements['Q_NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE'].value--;">
<input class="q_inc_button" type=button value="+" onClick="javascript:this.form.elements['Q_NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE'].value++;">

you will get plus and minus buttons beside your quantity box. This will work very well with the add to selection at the bottom of each page

Darren at casupply has this on his site

http://www.casupply.co.uk/acatalog/flooring.html

3 I agree with Jan £5 is alot for postage, it would put me off. It seems way over cost . £2.95 would be acceptable

[jxm28788]

I'd also welcome advice on couriers suitable for small businesses such as mine - if I could send packages for £2.95 each I would!

At the moment the cheapest option I can find is Royal Mails 3-4 day standard parcel service which is dependent on weight.

So far postage costs on orders have varied between £3.32 for a tiny package to £6.91 for a small but heavier package... Average so far is £4.27, plus of course the packaging...

Also, £5.00 seems fairly standard for my competition.

I have a logo, which I think is pretty cool, but when I tried to get it in the top bar it didn't work (either the logo looked ok but the bar took up 1/3rd page, or the bar was reasonable height but the logo was so small it looked rubbish. That's why I went for the text heading, with logo just on the home page...

Any ideas on how to get round that?

[pinbrook]

Have you looked at Royal Mail small packet service?

I was just thinking that you have items at 99p, some people might want to to just a couple of these items just to try them out, a weight based postal rate might serve you better!

[pinbrook]

attached doc shows how you could integrate your logo without it looking daft.

[jxm28788]

The only thing that I would suggest is to try the front page out with two columns rather than one - that gets more pictures shown initially Do you mean the main products page (1st page after entering the store)? How do I get two columns?

I'll look into Putting on labels for veggie/kosher/diabetic etc. I've updated the home page to include 'atkins', although most of my customers will know what it means due to the keywords they would have to search on to find my site.

attached doc shows how you could integrate your logo without it looking daft. that looks ok, what file do I have to edit to get the logo in there? and is there any easy way to move the shopping cart counter to the left as you've shown it?

Barriers to purchase

Appart from the postage costs, what else would prevent you from buying from my shop (assuming you were in the market for low carb stuff)? I seem to be getting a fair few hits, but not a great deal are being converted to customers. (although I don't know what a 'typical' conversion rate is...does anyone else)

Maybe I'll switch to a weight based delivery...

[jxm28788]

just ran a log analyser and it seems that 20% of my visitors are leaving from the home page, apparently not having viewed the rest of my site - and also 31% left after less than 1 minute and 45% had left by the 2nd minute!!!

Obviously my site is making a poor first impression - any ideas?

[Jan]

Try putting the chocolate bars or sweeties on the front page, or make a nice graphic with lots of the products in it.

Are those %s cumulative, ie have 96% left after the second minute or 45%, if it is the latter then 55% are staying for more than 2 minutes which is not bad.

In answer to an earlier question, you can set the number of section columns in design options | sections, there are settings for the top level section list and settings for all other sections lists.

Regards,

[jxm28788]

ah yes, 2 columns looks better!

no, 45% gone in the 1st 2 minutes, so only 55% spending more than 2 minutes...:(

Which template do I need to edit to get my logo in the left bar?

[jxm28788]

I've been playing with MS Paint, do you think this is an improvement? a big improvement or a little improvement? worth the time it will take to change it for real?

This is the main products page, but obviously the same layout would apply throughout...

http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign.JPG
http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/currentdesign.JPG

[pinbrook]

new design much better
you will have to edit act-primary and act-brochure primary

[jxm28788]

so, for the boxes on the left, how would I do that?

Would the whole bar including the logo, logo box, and 3 empty boxes just be one big graphic? Won't that be terribly slow to load?

Or does actnic have a 'box' function of some kind?

And how do I change the items/value to be black on white rather than white on black?

[Jan]

I much prefer the new one as well.

Regards,

[elfinp]

Just recommending RM small packets under regular 1st / 2nd class postage rates.. I have my site set up so everything is weight based - it takes a little longer to do (especially as my feasible order weights can be anything from 0.1 kg to 5kg plus) but it worth it to get fair postage - my rates up to 1 kilo weight are total order weight based staggered using 1st class postage and after that I use parcelforce rates. And then theres sets of completely different rates for Europe and the US/Canada

Royal Mail will also collect for a flat charge of £240.00 per year if you spend more than 5k per year on royal mail products (inc postage), and its free if you're over 15K/annum. Only trouble is you need seperate collection contracts with RM and Parcelforce... parcelforce on my list of things to look into coz while I have RM collection I don't have it for the heavier parcelforce items. If you're running in an area with lots of small businesses, you could look at splitting the cost with another business as well.

Postal rates for all RM/parcelforce services are detailed on their (slow but worth it) site - www.royal-mail.com

Steph

[jxm28788]

thanks, I will definately move over to weight based postage as £5.00 seems to be putting a lot of people off!

However, as I've just found out that nearly half my visitors are apparently put off just by looking at my home page I think I will do the redesign first! :D

Just trawling through the templates trying to figure out which bits to change - it's a real pain with all these variables because I have no way of visualising what it's trying to do and it calls so many subpages I'm all over the place - basically have no idea what's going on...:confused:

[elfinp]

50% of people staying longer than 2 minutes is EXCELLENT! You just need greater numbers hitting your site I suspect. A well designed campaign with something like google adwords or Overture (used by yahoo/msn/altavista et al) will help and because you have such a specialised product you should get higher-than-average visitors:buyers ratio. And with google at least you can specifiy your advertising budget and it won't let you go over that. Haven't set up my Overture account yet but I suspect they run on the same basis.

I say well designed because a poorly designed campaign can get you thousands of hits -all of which you pay for - and none of whom will buy. My campaigns for my site will be managed by a company specialising in promotion for small businesses at low cost - and as an ex partner in the company (I left 5 years ago) I can vouch for their professional committment! They charge £25.00 per month to manage up to 50 (I think) seperate campaigns and I am in no way affiliated to them except in the sense still being friends with one of the existing partners! I dunno if the £25.00 a month I'm charged is discounted but I think its their standard rate.

Steph

[jxm28788]

50% of people staying longer than 2 minutes is EXCELLENT! The thing is that I'm not in any search engines yet, so most of the traffic I'm getting is through goodle adwords.

As my ads use very specific keywords, and explain in the ad what my site does, I would expect that most users would come to the site knowing what my site is (a shop) and what it is selling (low carb foods). Therefore it seems strange to me that 50% of people who specifically clicked on a shop selling what they're looking for should then whiz off again without really going past the first couple of pages.

It seems to me that they are taking one look at it and thinking 'amateur', then rushing off to find one that looks more 'professional'. (ie A proper store that has been well designed and probably is quite a big organisation that's been around for ages, as opposed to a fly by night cowboy who knocked up the site over the weekend...)

But that's just my thoughts, which may bear no connection to reality...;)

additionally, I am getting a high click through ratio, but the key words simply don't rack up that many impressions to generate sufficient traffic as I guess there aren't that many people sitting at home in the UK looking for low carb stuff...

[elfinp]

I'd suggest cautiously editing your campaign to aim at health food and low fat shoppers as well (and as someone else mentioned, kc / nutrition info probably a good idea throughout). If it becomes the case that your click through ratio drops too much then you can always change it. But I'd also suggest other stuff before diong that.

What has occured to me whilst messing around with pva and cardboard boxes (don't ask... ingenuity and lack of money make for some interesting business props!) is that its a very male site. Its blue, dark and kinda chunky - it could sell fishing equipment or guys bad-weather hiking clothing - and by looking at it and your posts here I'd summarise that you're probably male, over 40, possibly with health problems hence the interest in healthy food, and had difficulty finding the right sort of stuff on the net at a reasonable price yourself.... ;-) But I would also think that that is NOT your target consumer group mainly because I suspect its quite a tiny group. I didn't look at your sight and think 'low carbohydrates - yummy!' I looked at though 'that could help my diet' (I'm getting to the point now...) I suspect that most of your click throughs are women and while I'm the last person in the world to be a fan of stereotypes (me=ex teenage mum... still a mum just very much no longer a teen - so my hatred of stereotypes is rather deeply ingrained!), healthy food tends to have a more female consumer base. Even if the food is for the guys, a lot of the time I'd suspect its their wives buying it. And your site is clearly not aimed to appeal to women, or even at both genders. If it were my business I'd lighten it up, make it brighter and probably more fruity (white with maybe lime and tangerine type highlights) and more... fine. Less chunky.

If I'm being too blunt hit me with a haddock. I can't help it, I'm a Geordie. :D

Steph

[elfinp]

Oh one other thing... as far as editing goes the ONLY pages I had to edit for my site design to be changed to my liking were ActinicPrimary and the checkout main page (order01 I think, off the top of my head). Everything else is pretty much called into these on demand by selecting Use Parent throughout when adding new stuff and uses the same colours etc as specified in the primary template. I think (I'm certainly no expert - my html is pretty basic and while I understand the principles behind the scripting, I certainly couldn't edit any of the programming myself). I certainly had no probs changing mine to my liking with minimal effort

Steph

[jxm28788]

its a very male site. Its blue, dark and kinda chunky ok, that hadn't occurred to me - maybe I'll go for a more female colour...I'd summarise that you're probably male, over 40, possibly with health problemswell, I'm male so 1 out of 3 aint bad...But I would also think that that is NOT your target consumer groupabsolutely, my customers will be mostly female, probably 25-40ish, with a perception that they are overweight...:Dyour site is clearly not aimed to appeal to women, or even at both genders. If it were my business I'd lighten it up, make it brighter and probably more fruity (white with maybe lime and tangerine type highlights) ok, the new design is much whiter and I'll experiment with fruity colours when I've redesigned the shape.Less chunkywhy chunky? is that the current design or the new design? what's wrong with the new design? it's got rounded edges, what more do you want...:p

[elfinp]

I'm a bad, bad person who didn't read your previous posts propery :p (or just one who works 20 hour days and has a tiny baby so can be forgiven when tiredness makes her miss things!) New design much better. You might find it worthwhile in the long run hunting around for a web dev company who can take it, slice it up properly and hand you back the relevant pages if you're having difficulties integrating it yourself. There wouldn't actually be that much work involved in doing it - you're only after a page template design, nothing fancy and no expensive stuff like custom programming or databases and so if you shop around you should be able to find a company who won't screw you over completely

[jxm28788]

actually my redesign is going ok at the moment - I'm just waiting for someone to answer this - so, for the boxes on the left, how would I do that? Would the whole bar including the logo, logo box, and 3 empty boxes just be one big graphic? Won't that be terribly slow to load? because I haven't got a clue, and I don't want to spend all day figuring out how to do it and then finding out it was the wrong way and I have to redo it all...:D

I guess there could be some kind of box command, or maybe I create it as several different graphics (ie. top, left side, right side, bottom) and then build the box around the text?

any ideas?

[Jan]

I think that you main page is a big boring but your main catalog page has real wow factor, I would get rid of the brochure page.

Regards,

[elfinp]

You could do it as a single graphic I guess and while it would be slow to load its going to be smaller file size than the individual componants. Plus one thing I have found with actinic is that its a right pain for sites not refreshing pages when one returns to them which could work for you coz it means your image will be cached (pain for me because I have a very fast changing product range)... personally I've fiddled with the metatags so it has to refresh every time its loaded - pain for anyone with a slow connection - but I am kind of ignoring obselete modems whilst designing... something has to give somewhere. Not just my site, have noticed it elsewhere. If you do it as individual componants you'll probably have to use a pixel-specifying-size table to get them placed properly and make sure it works in all browsers cuz they can be tempermental. You might need to read up on web design tricks to get it looking right in all browsers.

[jxm28788]

I think that you main page is a big boring but your main catalog page has real wow factor, I would get rid of the brochure page. funny you should say that, I was just thinking "hey this looks pretty cool, I think I'll make this my home page..."

[jxm28788]

ok, I've added the left bar with the logo and empty boxes as one graphic - that was pretty easy and only 20kb.

But how on earth do I get the text (NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONSTOP) to display over the graphic??? It only seems to let it go above or below.

I guess (hope) there is some sneaky way of doing this...?

[elfinp]

Set the graphic as a background to a table cell. Then you can stick whatever you like over it. Can't remember the exact code - probably td background="image.gif" but could be a variant like bg=... - do a quick search on google or something for basic html table use.

[jxm28788]

Nearly done, just got to figure out the spacing issue on the section list and I'm sorted.

In the mean time, how about your opinion on these 'fruitier', more female friendly colour schemes. I've used colours sampled from my logo -

http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-orange.gif
http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-orangish.gif
http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/newdesign-yellowish.gif

(ignore the corners and the buttons, it's getting late and they're a bugger to fill)

[elfinp]

I like the first one. The yellow is a bit mustard :p

Definitely looking a lot more girly-friendly!

[elfinp]

Oh and as far as colour change goes - if I were doing it I'd be using PSP and would simply be taking the old graphic and adjusting the colour using the hue/saturation/lightness function. Nice and quick and it would retain the setting on HSL that I used on one graphic so I could change the colour on other graphics with the same original colour without having to fiddle with the settings again.

[Jan]

> big boring
Sorry about that it should have said a bit boring.

I like the blue scheme best, sorry (I am in your target group BYW - just). In Actinic you can change the colours very easily in design colours, you can then do a site preview to see the results.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

The 1st design is the best one, I like the orange. I'm with elfinp on this, orange, I think the orange reflects the right tone, the blue in my opinion doesn't work. Blue is quitea teccie/corporate colour hence alot of computer sites use blues

but I would loose the light blue nav buttons, maybe replace them with black text links?

BTW I've looked at visitors stats for a cross section of sites on our servers (all successfull siteswith good SE listings and daily sales) they average from 48% to 68% of visits being less than 30 seconds.

Typical conversion rates (I think) are 2 to 4%

[jxm28788]

my conversion rate is about 1% at the moment, which is pants.

Can anyone suggest a tool for creating buttons - pref. free and easy to use...?

[jxm28788]

The 1st design is the best one, I like the orange. I'm with elfinp on this, orange, I think the orange reflects the right tone ok the new and hopefully improved (and orange) site is now up and mostly running.

big improvement?

[elfinp]

Looks great!

Couple of minor things. Firstly it has a horizontal scrollbar in 800*600 - irritating to those of us with neolithic monitors.

Secondly, I clicked on a section, went to look, went to go back to the home page - clicked on your logo - not a link. Its not something I would have noticed or even thought about but I've just realised that I automatically click on logos to go back to home pages.

Overall very very shiny though :D

[jxm28788]

Firstly it has a horizontal scrollbar in 800*600 - irritating to those of us with neolithic monitors yes I noticed that, as I did test it at that resolution to see if it still worked...

see the thread "aagghh - these stupid templates are driving me nutty!". it's that stupid bar that I can't find...oh look, someones replied - maybe fixed shortly then...clicked on your logo - not a link didn't think of that, I'll add it to the list...:)