Ecommerce website for review/ suggested improvements please

Kent Brockman

The link to my website is in my sig.

Alot of my sales come through trade shows, Baby fairs, exhibitions etc and then from repeat customers and word of mouth.
Most orders come via email or by pm on my facebook page.
I would prefer to get most orders from my new ecommerce website (less work!)

This is my 1st attempt at building a website.
I am getting average 800 hits a month since it went live but only <50 website orders per month from these visitors.

Would be interested to hear any views on how to improve the hit rate and opinions/ constructive advice on the website in general. (it is a template so there are some restrictions)
Thanks

Trojan

This is not a bad site at all for a first build - well done! Obviously there are lots of things that can be improved, but A+ for effort, definitely.

"Only" getting ~50 orders a month from 800 uniques is pretty damn awesome. I can only assume it's because your offline marketing at exhibitions etc is working very well for you - those kind of numbers are too good for "cold" traffic.

Regarding what can be improved...

I don't "get it" when I arrive on the site. "Prints 4 Gifts" - what's that mean - prints of paintings for sale? "- More than a Name", well that just confuses the hell out of me. You're making me think. Don't Make Me Think.

Up the top I see "Specialising in High Quality Personalised Framed Art for Babies & Children. Baby Gift store, fun unique gifts!". That's better! Get rid of the useless tagline "More than a name" and use a tag something like "Personalised Art for Babies and Kids"

The graphic design lets the site down, a lot. The theme itself is very good, Balita was a good choice for your market. An investment of a few hundred quid with a decent graphic designer would really help tidy the site up. Get a decent logo designed. I'm not crazy about the brand, but I know it's a pain to change and hard to find good ones - go with your gut on that. My thoughts would be Prints4Kids etc closer to your target.

The product photos should be better - they seem very grainy, like a filter has been applied. It doesn't work very well and looks awful in the thumbnails IMO. I was confused by the Handcrafted Jewellery, bracelets etc. Isn't this a print site?

Some quick issues:

- give the logo an alt tag
- remove the duplicate empty meta description
- create a better favicon

Hope this helps - make some changes and come back to us.

blue_morpho

Your website looks really good, I don't really have too many suggestions for you, have just posted myself looking for a review on my own site so not an expert by any means. Just to say though that my baby actually received one of your prints and I was very impressed with it and recommended you to loads of people, so I think its true to say that a big part of your business comes from word of mouth!!

One possible suggestion....would you consider buying the domain name for prints4gifts.ie rather than .com? As far as I know that would drive a lot more local traffic to your site if you targeted the right keywords? Again though am totally new to all this SEO stuff, so this is only what I have heard from others.

Best of luck with it!!

Kent Brockman

Thanks a million for taking the time to look at and review the website Trojan, appreciate it. It took 6 weeks of late nights and was all done from WP and Youtube tutorials (I had not even heard of WP before this).

We started out just doing the Personalised prints and hence the name Prints4gifts (prints for gifts) as that was our only product at the beginning.
The 'More than a name' bit was added with the intention of letting people know that we add extra details to the print (Date of birth, Time of birth, birth weight, Family members initials and a personalised message from the sender) i.e its more than just a name sign.

We have over 5k fans on FB and Prints4gifts is on all our promotional material, and is becoming more widely recognised so we will have to keep it.

As we became more popular we decided to add extra products to our range~ same target market and can be sold 'on the spot' at trade shows etc.

We were approached to sell the Jewellery by a busy local businesses who felt we could reach a wider audience than they could (i.e. on the net), we used their pics and are waiting on higher quality pics.

"- remove the duplicate empty meta description"- Sorry but I have no idea what this means:o

Thanks again for the constructive advice and encouraging words

Kent Brockman

blue_morpho wrote: »

Your website looks really good, I don't really have too many suggestions for you, have just posted myself looking for a review on my own site so not an expert by any means. Just to say though that my baby actually received one of your prints and I was very impressed with it and recommended you to loads of people, so I think its true to say that a big part of your business comes from word of mouth!!

One possible suggestion....would you consider buying the domain name for prints4gifts.ie rather than .com? As far as I know that would drive a lot more local traffic to your site if you targeted the right keywords? Again though am totally new to all this SEO stuff, so this is only what I have heard from others.

Best of luck with it!!

Thanks, delighted to hear you were happy with our prints and thanks a mil for the recommendations:D

Good luck with your new venture, its a highly competitive market you're entering and with new companies popping up every day the market is flooded at the moment.

komodosp

Kent Brockman wrote: »

T"- remove the duplicate empty meta description"- Sorry but I have no idea what this means:o

He means remove this line:

<meta name="description" content=""/>

There's another meta description added by the All in one SEO module

You say you are new to wordpress so I'm not sure if you got to / know how to edit the source code. If you do, if you go into your theme's footer.php file and take out the line

<meta name="description" content=""/>

You should be sorted... This is what the search engine looks to display when you show up on a search result. (Though in fairness it won't display a blank one but you might as well have the one you want)

Trojan

Sorry, didn't spot the question, I meant taking out that empty meta tag as komodosp said!