Please can you give me your thoughts and advice on my website

Mr Porridge

Hi there,

Please can you take a look at the layout of my website and give me some feedback.

All comments and criticisms are warmly welcomed!

www.irishcelticcrosses.com

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

Graham

I like it. Simple, clean uncluttered design, easy path to purchase with no unnecessary barriers on the way.

If sales permit, I would think about an alternative payment processor to Paypal at some point in the future. Many people just don't like using PayPal.

I'm surprised you're not charging for shipping, that must eat into your margin significantly for international sales. If you're not going to charge extra for shipping, it might be worth emphasising the fact that shipping is included. At the moment, shipping costs are just kind of not mentioned across the site.

Nice work Mr Porridge, hope it goes well for you.

Mr Porridge

Graham wrote: »

I like it. Simple, clean uncluttered design, easy path to purchase with no unnecessary barriers on the way.

If sales permit, I would think about an alternative payment processor to Paypal at some point in the future. Many people just don't like using PayPal.

I'm surprised you're not charging for shipping, that must eat into your margin significantly for international sales. If you're not going to charge extra for shipping, it might be worth emphasising the fact that shipping is included. At the moment, shipping costs are just kind of not mentioned across the site.

Nice work Mr Porridge, hope it goes well for you.

Hi Graham,

Thanks for taking the time to view my website and for your comments.

The shipping is not actually included in the price, it is added in as a line item when you add your address at the checkout stage. Perhaps I should have a 'Shipping' page that allows customers to see the costs upfront?

Thank you

Mr Porridge

Mr. G

I like it. Nice clean easy modern feel to it.

There's no address on the Contact page.

The local buttons at the bottom of the page don't like to your social network pages, you should update these with links to your own social network pages.

Mr Porridge

Mr. G wrote: »

I like it. Nice clean easy modern feel to it.

There's no address on the Contact page.

The local buttons at the bottom of the page don't like to your social network pages, you should update these with links to your own social network pages.

Thanks Mr G.

I like the simple uncomplicated look. I have not set up any social networking pages yet. I know that i'm missing out big time but have not got around to it yet!

Mr Porridge

The Pontiac

I really like it, it's very 'clean'. Is it Shopify?

Really like the products too.

Any sales yet?

Mr Porridge

The Pontiac wrote: »

I really like it, it's very 'clean'. Is it Shopify?

Really like the products too.

Any sales yet?

Hi,

Many thanks for the feedback.

Yes it's a Shopify. I like the minimal look too - I think that some sites can be very busy when you look at them.

Thanks for saying that you like the products - that means a lot to me - even more then you saying that you like the site believe it or not!

I have had sales both in Ireland and abroad too. I got a lot of great advice by posters on this thread and the SEO thread (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056997091). I'm now trying to implement as much of it as possible. I did not think that people would really take the time to have a look and then post useful feedback.

Mr Porridge

The Pontiac

Mr Porridge wrote: »

Hi,

Many thanks for the feedback.

Yes it's a Shopify. I like the minimal look too - I think that some sites can be very busy when you look at them.

Thanks for saying that you like the products - that means a lot to me - even more then you saying that you like the site believe it or not!

I have had sales both in Ireland and abroad too. I got a lot of great advice by posters on this thread and the SEO thread (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056997091). I'm now trying to implement as much of it as possible. I did not think that people would really take the time to have a look and then post useful feedback.

Mr Porridge

Thanks a lot, will check out that thread. Exactly what I'm looking for!

I'm in the process of setting up a Shopify store myself.

I'm also sending you a PM regarding your products.

PaulPinnacle

Trying to breeze through this quickly, so ignore the order here (it isn't done by importance), I'm just adding things as I spot them on the site.

Logo: At the moment, the logo is taking up far too much of the most valuable real estate on your site.

You either need to resize the logo so the height is reduced considerably (meaning the other 2/3rds of the top of the page isn't wasted) or else try and place something meaningful in that 2/3rds that adds value.

As others have commented on how much they like the 'clean' look of the site, I'd suggest reducing the size is probably the preferable option of the two there, but something certainly needs to be done with it. Possibly something that would benefit from a little A/B testing, but as traffic is low at the moment and there's no clear call to action on the page to measure against, it's a little early for that.

Navigation Menu: I'm referring to this as an issue with the navigation menu, which it is, but more fundamentally it's an issue with the site architecture.

Put simply, there's too many links there. More importantly, there's too many pages there full stop (given the similarity of the products, at least at first glance for someone that doesn't really 'know' them) even if they weren't being linked to.

I'd need a better understanding of your product (and more importantly how people shop/search for your product) to know exactly how you should address this. Hopefully you'll be able to do it intuitively with a few little nudges in the right direction.

Sit down for a minute with a pen and paper (mind mapping software if you're so inclined or even just mental notes) and figure out the most important pages on your site.

Some of these may (or may not) help:
What's the most important factor when choosing a product? I'd imagine it's size from the way the site is currently laid out (I'd have guessed material if I'm honest), but correct me if I'm wrong.
What's the most important secondary factor? I'd imagine material, but again open to correction.
What's the most important xxxx factor? (List out as many as you need to give the full range of products that you supply - things like the bespoke offerings could obviously be treated differently)

Figure out what information your users want quickly and easily, putting that up front where they can't miss it. From a quick glance you appear to have 24 products (taking the totals from both 24" and 51", perhaps this misses some?) and at least 41 individual URLs with which to access various subsets of those 24 products.

When it comes to search engines, that's a horrid situation for crawl efficiency, overall quality of your site (too much duplicate content and dispersion of link equity) and as a result you'll find it much tougher to rank those pages.

Forgetting about the SEO side of it (and the reason why your SEO suffers in situations like this), it makes your site difficult to navigate as a user. It took me quite a while to realise that the site was basically just offering me a single product (forgetting about the bespoke) with 3 options available: size, material and plaque.

The SEO side of it could be easily solved with a band aid fix (even without any changes) with simply selecting which pages are wanted to rank and correct employment of some canonical tags (telling the search engine that another 'version' of this page is the one that should rank and to basically ignore this individual URL). However, the user side of it is more important and directly related so I'd avoid simply going for the 'technical' SEO fix and instead rethinking some of those pages and the way the products are currently navigated. (If you want to dig into this topic in more depth, Google for articles relating to "Taxonomy")




There's also a major issue there with duplicate content... but that's directly related to the above so perhaps it's worth considering how you address one before saying too much on the other. Long story short, if something is worthy of having a unique URL it should (read MUST) have quality unique content on the page (and not just a unique mixture of which content is copy/pasted from elsewhere).

Personally I'd move the majority of the second row of links from the nav bar to the footer (it has less weighting in the eyes of the search engines and less likely to be clicked by users - so figure out which elements aren't as important and move them down).

Really, you're looking to make the users experience of arriving on your site, finding the exact product they need and purchasing it as simple as possible. You can call it UX (user experience design), you can call it CRO (conversion rate optimisation), or anything else you like, the bottom line is you're simply trying to remove the clutter (from duplication of nav links or irrelevant links to poor copy) and make the process as easy as possible.

Contact Us: Definitely provide a postal address (pretty sure that's a legal requirement to be honest) and I'd consider adding a landline number (easy to pick up a virtual landline from the likes of Goldfish for little cost if no actual landline available). Sometimes we do things we've seen elsewhere as we're too lazy/uncreative/etc to come up with something else. Sometimes providing information where it’s expected to be is essential to establish immediate trust and gain the confidence of the user to continue their journey.

You're looking to build trust, so all of these little things help. They'll also help when it comes to local search, so benefits to both rankings and user behaviour. (With that in mind, you should also include a privacy statement outlining what information is collected, how it's secured, etc etc.)

From a personal/subjective opinion, it looks a bit sterile and cold there. I imagine it's a relatively small business with only a handful of employees (or 1)? If so, don't try and hide that fact. The truth is, people like people. Get a picture up there, get your name and background up there, get up things that will build trust and show potential customers who they are putting their trust in. (The above goes for both the Contact and the About Us pages - on the about us, hyperlink the discussion of shipping to the shipping cost page).

Do you really need 3 email addresses? If you make a user have to make a decision, you increase the chance of them deciding not to bother doing anything and simply leaving. I'd strongly suggest reducing that down to a single email addy which should see an increase in users actually using it.

(Social links have been mentioned, but if you're not going to update them in the short term best to remove them [simply comment out the code and you can replace later])

While the point about providing an alternative to PayPal is a good one, and well worth considering, it's actually quite a bad user experience to display alternative payment logos on the site and then not accept them (I understand that most can be used via a PayPal guest account, but that's not how some [potentially vocal] users will see it). I'd remove the logos other than PayPal from the bottom of the page.


When it comes to the onpage SEO factors, the basics of this are very well documented across the web. I won't bore you with the details in one place as I'd simply be repeating what's available elsewhere. If you jump here (Google Webmaster Tools), here (Bing Webmaster Tools, specifically the SEO analyzer), here, here and here (a few random articles on ecommerce and optimisation [SEO or CRO]), you'll get a good feel for what you should be doing and a few examples of how to do it. If you've any specific questions on what you find there, fire it up here and someone (myself or others) will be happy to help.

Mr Porridge wrote: »

Perhaps I should have a 'Shipping' page that allows customers to see the costs upfront?

You appear to have added this already, but only as an image file. The content of images isn't available for search engines to index and isn't available for users to search for as a result. Feel free to retain the image if you believe it presents the data in a nice way (personally I think it looks poor, is of a low quality and doesn't fit with the rest of the site), but do get the content up as normal text too.

uglybunz

I noticed a problem that could lose you sales. If your visitor is using a script blocker then they receive no warning that they should have Javascript enabled, and some features such as the menus, degrade to css, so the site appears to function but the shop doesn't work. I suggest that you prominently notify such visitors that they need to enable Javascript in their web browser to use your site. Tested with NoScript/Firefox.

Mr Porridge

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Trying to breeze through this quickly, so ignore the order here (it isn't done by importance), I'm just adding things as I spot them on the site.

Logo: At the moment, the logo is taking up far too much of the most valuable real estate on your site.

You either need to resize the logo so the height is reduced considerably (meaning the other 2/3rds of the top of the page isn't wasted) or else try and place something meaningful in that 2/3rds that adds value.

As others have commented on how much they like the 'clean' look of the site, I'd suggest reducing the size is probably the preferable option of the two there, but something certainly needs to be done with it. Possibly something that would benefit from a little A/B testing, but as traffic is low at the moment and there's no clear call to action on the page to measure against, it's a little early for that.

Navigation Menu: I'm referring to this as an issue with the navigation menu, which it is, but more fundamentally it's an issue with the site architecture.

Put simply, there's too many links there. More importantly, there's too many pages there full stop (given the similarity of the products, at least at first glance for someone that doesn't really 'know' them) even if they weren't being linked to.

I'd need a better understanding of your product (and more importantly how people shop/search for your product) to know exactly how you should address this. Hopefully you'll be able to do it intuitively with a few little nudges in the right direction.

Sit down for a minute with a pen and paper (mind mapping software if you're so inclined or even just mental notes) and figure out the most important pages on your site.

Some of these may (or may not) help:
What's the most important factor when choosing a product? I'd imagine it's size from the way the site is currently laid out (I'd have guessed material if I'm honest), but correct me if I'm wrong.
What's the most important secondary factor? I'd imagine material, but again open to correction.
What's the most important xxxx factor? (List out as many as you need to give the full range of products that you supply - things like the bespoke offerings could obviously be treated differently)

Figure out what information your users want quickly and easily, putting that up front where they can't miss it. From a quick glance you appear to have 24 products (taking the totals from both 24" and 51", perhaps this misses some?) and at least 41 individual URLs with which to access various subsets of those 24 products.

When it comes to search engines, that's a horrid situation for crawl efficiency, overall quality of your site (too much duplicate content and dispersion of link equity) and as a result you'll find it much tougher to rank those pages.

Forgetting about the SEO side of it (and the reason why your SEO suffers in situations like this), it makes your site difficult to navigate as a user. It took me quite a while to realise that the site was basically just offering me a single product (forgetting about the bespoke) with 3 options available: size, material and plaque.

The SEO side of it could be easily solved with a band aid fix (even without any changes) with simply selecting which pages are wanted to rank and correct employment of some canonical tags (telling the search engine that another 'version' of this page is the one that should rank and to basically ignore this individual URL). However, the user side of it is more important and directly related so I'd avoid simply going for the 'technical' SEO fix and instead rethinking some of those pages and the way the products are currently navigated. (If you want to dig into this topic in more depth, Google for articles relating to "Taxonomy")




There's also a major issue there with duplicate content... but that's directly related to the above so perhaps it's worth considering how you address one before saying too much on the other. Long story short, if something is worthy of having a unique URL it should (read MUST) have quality unique content on the page (and not just a unique mixture of which content is copy/pasted from elsewhere).

Personally I'd move the majority of the second row of links from the nav bar to the footer (it has less weighting in the eyes of the search engines and less likely to be clicked by users - so figure out which elements aren't as important and move them down).

Really, you're looking to make the users experience of arriving on your site, finding the exact product they need and purchasing it as simple as possible. You can call it UX (user experience design), you can call it CRO (conversion rate optimisation), or anything else you like, the bottom line is you're simply trying to remove the clutter (from duplication of nav links or irrelevant links to poor copy) and make the process as easy as possible.

Contact Us: Definitely provide a postal address (pretty sure that's a legal requirement to be honest) and I'd consider adding a landline number (easy to pick up a virtual landline from the likes of Goldfish for little cost if no actual landline available). Sometimes we do things we've seen elsewhere as we're too lazy/uncreative/etc to come up with something else. Sometimes providing information where it’s expected to be is essential to establish immediate trust and gain the confidence of the user to continue their journey.

You're looking to build trust, so all of these little things help. They'll also help when it comes to local search, so benefits to both rankings and user behaviour. (With that in mind, you should also include a privacy statement outlining what information is collected, how it's secured, etc etc.)

From a personal/subjective opinion, it looks a bit sterile and cold there. I imagine it's a relatively small business with only a handful of employees (or 1)? If so, don't try and hide that fact. The truth is, people like people. Get a picture up there, get your name and background up there, get up things that will build trust and show potential customers who they are putting their trust in. (The above goes for both the Contact and the About Us pages - on the about us, hyperlink the discussion of shipping to the shipping cost page).

Do you really need 3 email addresses? If you make a user have to make a decision, you increase the chance of them deciding not to bother doing anything and simply leaving. I'd strongly suggest reducing that down to a single email addy which should see an increase in users actually using it.

(Social links have been mentioned, but if you're not going to update them in the short term best to remove them [simply comment out the code and you can replace later])

While the point about providing an alternative to PayPal is a good one, and well worth considering, it's actually quite a bad user experience to display alternative payment logos on the site and then not accept them (I understand that most can be used via a PayPal guest account, but that's not how some [potentially vocal] users will see it). I'd remove the logos other than PayPal from the bottom of the page.


When it comes to the onpage SEO factors, the basics of this are very well documented across the web. I won't bore you with the details in one place as I'd simply be repeating what's available elsewhere. If you jump here (Google Webmaster Tools), here (Bing Webmaster Tools, specifically the SEO analyzer), here, here and here (a few random articles on ecommerce and optimisation [SEO or CRO]), you'll get a good feel for what you should be doing and a few examples of how to do it. If you've any specific questions on what you find there, fire it up here and someone (myself or others) will be happy to help.

You appear to have added this already, but only as an image file. The content of images isn't available for search engines to index and isn't available for users to search for as a result. Feel free to retain the image if you believe it presents the data in a nice way (personally I think it looks poor, is of a low quality and doesn't fit with the rest of the site), but do get the content up as normal text too.

Hi Paul,

I am blown away again when I think of the trouble you have gone to. You have obviously taken a very good look at my site and i'm hugely appreciative of the very helpful feedback and advice that you have given me here. There are suggestions that you have made there that I now think...why didn't I think of that??!!

I have taken on board what you have said and have made the following changes based on your advice.

1. I have resized the logo which has lead to an increase in the area in the top 1/3 of the page. This allows a second row of featured products to be seen without any scrolling.

2. I have had a rethink about which of the cross features are most important to the customer. I now also believe that the wood type is number 1, followed by size. After this the plaque material and type of finish comes into play. Due to the fact that there are only between 4 and 8 variants of each type of cross (by wood type), I don't think that dropdown nav links are required at all. So my main menu now just consists of the 4 wood types which link to 4 respective pages containing the variants of each. I have briefly explained about the variations in each collection page.

3. I have added the postal address to the Contact Us page and slightly elaborated by telling saying that we are a 'small family business'. I'm also considering uploading a photo.

4. I have added a land line number.

5. I have moved the second row of links from the top menu down to the footer. A) Less clutter and easier route to purchase. It further increases the space in the top 1/3 for product images.

6) I have consolidated the email addresses to just a single one. I think what you said about giving the customer a choice or making him/her confused might leave them making no choice at all and just leaving the site!

7) I now have a Facebook business page and a Twitter account. (https://www.facebook.com/irishceltic.crosses and @IrishCrosses)

8)I have removed the social medial buttons that are not being used.

9) I decided against commenting out the mastercard, visa etc symbols. I think that they add something to the site that I cant put my finger on. As you say they can be used through paypal but an alternative merchant service system would be good too.

10) I have hyperlinked the shipping text on the About us page to the Shipping table.

11) I'm in the process of updating the shipping table. It's actually hard to get it right. I cant copy and paste an excel table and then upload it as its only 160kb in size and looks even worse then what I have at the minute. The Shopify tables are not great and not easy to use. I'm thinking of printing the table from excel and then photographing it and uploading that! Not great I know!


12) I took your suggestion about the Anglo tapes and Irelands reputation and engraved the plaque in the pic. I tried circulating it to journalists, comedians, The Journal, The Daily Edge and several radio stations but unfortunately they have not picked up on it which is a shame. I used Twitter and direct emails to circulate the pic.

http://i1343.photobucket.com/albums/o791/IrishCelticCrosses/ANGLO5.jpg


Thank you for the SEO advice links. I think i'm going to take some time to sit down and make some notes from all those sources.

I'm going to add a privacy statement today. Is this a matter of telling the user that the site is tracked by Google Analytics? I might look for a ready made statement to this effect online.

I didn't understand what you meant by the following:

"The SEO side of it could be easily solved with a band aid fix (even without any changes) with simply selecting which pages are wanted to rank and correct employment of some canonical tags (telling the search engine that another 'version' of this page is the one that should rank and to basically ignore this individual URL)."

If you don't mind could you explain how this is done?

Again, i'm extremely grateful for the time you have taken and the advice you have given me.

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

uglybunz wrote: »

I noticed a problem that could lose you sales. If your visitor is using a script blocker then they receive no warning that they should have Javascript enabled, and some features such as the menus, degrade to css, so the site appears to function but the shop doesn't work. I suggest that you prominently notify such visitors that they need to enable Javascript in their web browser to use your site. Tested with NoScript/Firefox.

Hi uglybunz,

Thanks for the heads up - had no idea about that at all. How do other websites with this same problem notify users? Would it be written near the top of the page or would it be like a pop up?

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

uglybunz

You can't do pop-ups if scripts are blocked, but html has a simple solution, Google the 'noscript' tag for your answer.

Mr Porridge

uglybunz wrote: »

You can't do pop-ups if scripts are blocked, but html has a simple solution, Google the 'noscript' tag for your answer.

Thanks you for that.

Would you mind checking what it is like now that I have added the noscript please?

Regards,

Mr Porridge

uglybunz

That's the idea... you can easily test it yourself by temporarily turning off Javascript in your web browser and then viewing your site. But with the growing prevalence of web malware, script blocking browser plugins are becoming quite common these days - especially with naive web users who have previously been stung by malware, and who may not think of turning them off when they are shopping online... "drat, why can't I put this in my cart?".

I would style it a bit, maybe centre it in a red box in a headline font to make it more prominent, other than that it's perfect.

Mr Porridge

uglybunz wrote: »

That's the idea... you can easily test it yourself by temporarily turning off Javascript in your web browser and then viewing your site. But with the growing prevalence of web malware, script blocking browser plugins are becoming quite common these days - especially with naive web users who have previously been stung by malware, and who may not think of turning them off when they are shopping online... "drat, why can't I put this in my cart?".

I would style it a bit, maybe centre it in a red box in a headline font to make it more prominent, other than that it's perfect.

Thanks, I have check it there myself too and see what you mean!Mr Porridge

LukeQuietus

For SEO I'd move the Welcome section so it comes first. The images / catelogue would be better suited in a seperate, dedicated page or layed out in row/column style rather than a block style. Like the middle / bottom of this page this: http://sell.wpengine.com/ Other that it's fine. Could do with some colour (but be tasteful). Less is more, but none is none.

Mr Porridge

LukeQuietus wrote: »

For SEO I'd move the Welcome section so it comes first. The images / catelogue would be better suited in a seperate, dedicated page or layed out in row/column style rather than a block style. Like the middle / bottom of this page this: http://sell.wpengine.com/ Other that it's fine. Could do with some colour (but be tasteful). Less is more, but none is none.

Hi again

I've made quite a few changes to my site. I'm still getting quite a high Bounce Rate. If anyone has any more advice or would like to comment on the changes then please feel free!

www.irishcelticcrosses.com

Kind Regards,

Robert

tricky D

I reckon there's a lot of work which needs be done on this.

First, the logo and strapline needs work, simplification mainly. I would remove the hands bit and the bit above the cross. I'd remove 'Recognise your Roots' (low relevance) and move the 'Grave Marking Crosses' into that space. I'd get someone to tidy the logo and type up too.

A lot of the text copy needs to be retreated and made a lot more snappy and savvy. Eg. most of homepage copy above the products could be removed. There's 3 paras there: the 1st could be just removed as it is fluff content with little value. The main points of the 2nd could be boiled down to snappy phrases like: Worldwide Shipping; Honour the Memory of Your Dearly Departed; and given treatment like an aside. Ideally you shouldn't need the 'Click on one of our most popular Grave Markers below to discover it's unique Irish features.' at all as it should be intuitive.

The treatment of the products needs a big overhaul. As PaulPinnacle says you basically (ignoring Bespoke for the moment) have one product with 3 variations: size, material and plaque. Trying to go through 24 pages with these variants is far too much/many and gets confusing due to the similarities. What would be much better would be to have it pitched as one product with 3 variables that the user can customise themselves. So instead of a user clicking through up to 24 pages with different combinations, they would have a single page with 3 options for size, material and plaque, selecting their combination with a refresh to the relevant image. Shopify has some scope for this with variants but I'm not sure about the refresh bit and pricing updating. KonFusion is likely to be the user who would know more about this.

Having to send the Engraving text by email as a separate process is less than ideal. There should be a textbox for this as part of the purchase process. The 'Add special instructions for your order...' could do this if you changed the text accordingly.

When I get to the PayPal page in the checkout, shipping doesn't appear to be included; it should at least be mentioned if it hasn't yet been calculated to mitigate against users getting the unpleasant price jump surprise which hurts conversion. Not sure if you have such options available with PP.

'Cancel and return to irishcelticcrosses@gmail.com.' on one of the PayPal pages isn't the right text.

The photos need to be fixed so that the crosses are not skewed as they are not properly horizontal and vertical and don't look so good as a result.

The typfacing needs a lot of work with better usage of sizing, indentation, colouring (it's almost all the same green to the point of blandness), positioning. But don't over do this.

A few other details which need fixing/attention:
On the homepage the text 'Bespoke Cross Making Service' at the bottom hasn't been properly linked.
Some email addresses are not linked up as mailtos.
The product image popups have no navigation.
The contact page could do with a form and perhaps even a map (though not really needed it adds a little bit more trust).
Add http://www.bereavementireland.com/ to your bereavement links.
Make the shipping table graphic into a text table.
Shipping times in the About Us page and Shipping page do not match.
Could get some happy customer feedback.

That's enoug fo the time being for you to consider.

gl

uglybunz

Here's something that crossed my mind when I first viewed your site, and I'd guess it will keep your bounce rate high.

When I say "celtic cross" I mean something with a particular shape, here's the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_cross

But your crosses are "crosses", not what I would term a "celtic cross". So if I were looking for one like those on Wikipedia, I would return to my search.

I note that you use a "celtic cross" in your logo, but I can't see any crosses like that for sale on your site?

Mr Porridge

tricky D wrote: »

I reckon there's a lot of work which needs be done on this.

First, the logo and strapline needs work, simplification mainly. I would remove the hands bit and the bit above the cross. I'd remove 'Recognise your Roots' (low relevance) and move the 'Grave Marking Crosses' into that space. I'd get someone to tidy the logo and type up too.

A lot of the text copy needs to be retreated and made a lot more snappy and savvy. Eg. most of homepage copy above the products could be removed. There's 3 paras there: the 1st could be just removed as it is fluff content with little value. The main points of the 2nd could be boiled down to snappy phrases like: Worldwide Shipping; Honour the Memory of Your Dearly Departed; and given treatment like an aside. Ideally you shouldn't need the 'Click on one of our most popular Grave Markers below to discover it's unique Irish features.' at all as it should be intuitive.

The treatment of the products needs a big overhaul. As PaulPinnacle says you basically (ingoring Bespoke for the moment) have one product with 3 variations: size, material and plaque. Trying to go through 24 pages with these variants is far too much/many and gets confusing due to the similarities. What would be much better would be to have it pitched as one product with 3 variables that the user can customise themselves. So instead of a user clicking through up to 24 pages with different combinations, they would have a single page with 3 options for size, material and plaque, selecting their combination with a refresh to the relevant image. Shopify has some scope for this with variants but I'm not sure about the refresh bit and pricing updating. KonFusion is likely to be the user who would know more about this.

Having to send the Engraving text by email as a separate process is less than ideal. There should be a textbox for this as part of the purchase process. The 'Add special instructions for your order...' could do this if you changed the text accordingly.

When I get to the PayPal page in the checkout, shipping doesn't appear to be included; it should at least be mentioned if it hasn't yet been calculated to mitigate against users getting the unpleasant price jump surprise which hurts conversion. Not sure if you have such options available with PP.

'Cancel and return to irishcelticcrosses@gmail.com.' on one of the PayPal pages isn't the right text.

The photos need to be fixed so that the crosses are not skewed as they are not properly horizontal and vertical and don't look so good as a result.

The typfacing needs a lot of work with better usage of sizing, indentation, colouring (it's almost all the same green to the point of blandness), positioning. But don't over do this.

A few other details which need fixing/attention:
On the homepage the text 'Bespoke Cross Making Service' at the bottom hasn't been properly linked.
Some email addresses are not linked up as mailtos.
The product image popups have no navigation.
The contact page could do with a form and perhaps even a map (though not really needed it adds a little bit more trust).
Add http://www.bereavementireland.com/ to your bereavement links.
Make the shipping table graphic into a text table.
Shipping times in the About Us page and Shipping page do not match.
Could get some happy customer feedback.

That's enoug fo the time being for you to consider.

gl

Thank you for your advice tricky D.

I have now made the following changes:

1) I have migrated to a new more relevant website address: www.IrishGraveMarkers.com and may reduce the bounce rate.

2) I have changed the logo to say 'Grave Markers' as it it relevant and straight to the point. I have left 'Recognize your Roots' as it is our tag line. The crown at the top of the logo and the hands either side form part of the Claddagh so I have left them in too.

3) I removed the irrelevant fluff at the top of the homepage and the 'Please get started by click on the most popular below...'. I believe this will be done intuitively.

4) I have made the text at the bottom of the home page more snappy by making it into user friendly bullet points. A potential customer can get the key points in seconds.

5) I have contacted KonFusion regarding an overhaul of the product layout. I totally agree that it is a single product with many variants. I'm just having some trouble associating more than one product image to each variants. Working on this at the minute.

6) Ive contacted Shopify about how to change the 'Cancel and return to irishcelticcrosses@gmail.com.' on one of the PayPal pages. This should be changed within 24 hours.

7) I have instructed the customers to use the text box at the checkout to send their engraving text. I agree that this is a better way to do things. I've removed all the email addys (that were not linked up as mailto's) from the various pages now.

8) I think that the photos of the large crosses are okay. I agree that I need to re photograph the small crosses to make sure the featured image is taken at the same angle for all of them. Do you think that it looks so amateurish that they should be temporally removed?

9) I'm afraid to jazz up the green text too much. I want it to remain neat and 'respectful' and formal if you know what I mean. This is due to the nature of the site and the people who will be visiting. I have changed it up a little on the main page so hopefully it does not come across super bland!

10) I have fixed the broken links that you have spotted.

11) I have added the Bereavement Ireland resource link.

12) I tried a few demo contact forms on the Contact Us page. I didn't like the look of them. I'm on the look out for a good one with a html code that I can copy and paste into the page liquid.

Please can you tell me what you mean by "The product image popups have no navigation" is this what I would call image zoom?

Again, thank you very much for taking the time to look at my site in detail and provide me with the feedback. As you can see i'm trying to implement it as best I can. Please feel free to browse my site at any time and send me your criticisms, comments or compliments!


Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

uglybunz wrote: »

Here's something that crossed my mind when I first viewed your site, and I'd guess it will keep your bounce rate high.

When I say "celtic cross" I mean something with a particular shape, here's the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_cross

But your crosses are "crosses", not what I would term a "celtic cross". So if I were looking for one like those on Wikipedia, I would return to my search.

I note that you use a "celtic cross" in your logo, but I can't see any crosses like that for sale on your site?

Hi uglybunz,

Thank you for the advice and I totally agree with you. I think that I may have had the blinkers on or was in denial about this.

I have now migrated my whole site to www.IrishGraveMarkers.com

Kind Regards,

Robert

uglybunz

One final thing - I noticed that you are still showing the old logo with the "Irish Celtic crosses" at the foot of the home page, with a link to http://www.irishcelticcrosses.com/collections/catalogue

Good luck with your site!

uglybunz

Mr Porridge

uglybunz wrote: »

One final thing - I noticed that you are still showing the old logo with the "Irish Celtic crosses" at the foot of the home page, with a link to http://www.irishcelticcrosses.com/collections/catalogue

Good luck with your site!

uglybunz

Thanks uglybunz,

I have not got around to changing it yet nut it's on my to do list!

Cheers!

Mr Porridge

www.IrishGraveMarkers.com

Mr Porridge

Hi All,

Please can you take another look at my site?

I have a good number of people coming to the site on a daily basis. About 25% stay and browse the site but we are suffering from a low conversion rate.

Is there anything else obvious that I might be missing?

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

D Hayes

Hi there,

I'd recommend optimizing or removing that background image - it's 2.1MB, which is massive and takes a while to download. It's going to hurt your overall page load speed, which will negatively affect your Google rankings.

In relation to the site, I'd like to see more "calls to action" above the page fold:

- There's a lot of white space to the right of the logo - that's prime real estate which could be used for a "trust signal" (for example, sub menu with Shipping Info, About Us, Contact Us etc. and credit card icons on top right) or call to action (a "free shipping this month" graphic).

- I'd put a slider below the main menu with a few attractive graphics. The middle product section is too similar (I appreciate you are selling similar products), and I'm not compelled to click through.

As mentioned, a slider with prominent graphics and a large button (e.g. best sellers) may improve click-throughs to individual products.

An example of an effective slider.

LukeQuietus

Mr Porridge wrote: »

Hi again

I've made quite a few changes to my site. I'm still getting quite a high Bounce Rate. If anyone has any more advice or would like to comment on the changes then please feel free!

www.irishcelticcrosses.com

Kind Regards,

Robert

You're probably getting quite a high bounce rate due to everyone from this thread going on and then quickly leaving to get writing their thoughts for you. Also while you are working on it make sure you're not being included in the analytics. It'll skew everything

Mr Porridge

Hi there,

Please can you take a look at my site and offer your thoughts on:

1 The appearance / user friendliness / over all impression.
2 your ideas on the best way to market / advertise my site.

All comments and criticisms are welcomed.

www.irishgravemarkers.com

Kind Regards

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

Hi guys,

Does anybody have any creative ideas for how I could market my website or product?

www.irishgravemarkers.com

Many Thanks in advance,

Mr P