Morgret Designs

Comments on individual sites.

Site selling high end audio/video equipment
(didn’t write down URL correctly)

Suggestions were to:

• Make the “add to cart” button larger.
• For a visual hierarchy use product image, then logo, then add to cart.
• Make your images large. The larger your images, the more compelling the product. It creates a stickiness to the product, people don’t have to go to other websites to find better images.
• Showing related products makes since, but the picture shown for the related product is not a compelling picture. Show the related product in use. Reduce the list of related products, just include what makes for a really good sales message.
• There is an announcement about free shipping (good), but it is in a large banner-looking image on the right hand column (bad) that people are tuning out because it looks like an outside ad.

Suddenly Slimmer

• This site (for a day spa in Arizona) has a lot of text in a light color at the bottom of the page that looked like keyword stuffing (though it was also working, as it had a decent ranking in the results). A mention of Google looking for a 10 percent shade with background, and the large amount of non-content text was not good.
• On the product pages, make the image linkable to additional product information. Right now the user needs to click “buy” to find out information about the product, and people are afraid to commit to buying when they want more information first. Easy fix is to rename the buy button to “more information” or “details”.
• The large image sizes of the products are good and compelling.
• Rewrite the URLs to make them simple and good for SEO.
• Contact Rob for a button he has made for buy/adding to cart.
• Move the pricing information block higher on the page, right under the name of the product. Right now, especially on a smaller monitor, one has to scroll vertically to find the price.
• Put the product name in the title for that page, then you can add company information if you want. Put unique titles on your pages — search engines don’t like seeing 5000 pages with the same title.

ProPools

This site is in the middle of a redesign. All pages are hand coded, nothing is dynamic. The copy at the top is written for SEO, and works well in the search engines for the query for above ground pool. Owner asks about how good is the current approach, if the site should be dynamic or leave it static with hard coding. The price is dynamic.

• Be careful of changing something that is doing well. If there is a redesign, only do a couple of new pages and see how they preform before changing other pages. [KM: A good tip I heard at the NewYork NewYork Pubcon event this afternoon was to make sure that you have your old code backed up and ready to put back up if the new site design flops].
• Might be good to do an FAQ-style thing for the page information. There is lots of information on the page and it is difficult to find everything.

Flic.com
(barcode scanners)

Owner comments that the shopping cart is hosted on a different URL, it is templated, and hosted by a different company. Long term they would like to put the shopping cart inhouse.

• The shopping cart on a different domain is spreading the value of the site across different pages and domains, it does need to be moved in house.
• The navigation on the site changes from the right to the left of the screen because of moving to the different site. The navigation needs to be consistent across the sites.
• The banner is taking up a lot of screen real estate. Move stuff around, try to move stuff to the sweet spot in the upper left of the screen if possible.
• There are page title issues with this site. Give each product page a distinct title.
• Change the H1 on a particular page from Scanners to Laser Barcode Scanners. This is an important page element.
• Put your 1-800 number on the site (800 is better than an 866 or 877 number, makes you appear that you have been in business longer). The white space at the top of the product image on the right side of the screen would be a great place for this.

Plumber Surplus

The site has been undergoing optimization for the past six months, both on the homepage and category pages.

• Put credit card symbols on the page. Make it easy for people to give you money.
• Try to flatten the site. Right now it seems like there are a lot of clicks needed to get to a particular product. You lose search engine credit and lose the user too quickly. Page abandonment rate is something the site owner should investigate.
• URL rewrites are needed.

MarciDesign

Site owner asked about upsell strategies. When there are other components to the product, how do you get somebody to buy more than what they came for?

• Need to be careful as to how much you try to sell. You want to remove all impediments to buying (example of godaddy being really annoying about trying to sell many other services given here), not make them click through a bunch of other offers.
• One way that does work for upsell is a one-checkbox option. Do you want this one other item, yes or no. Try testing this, but make it subtle and easy to get out of if the buyer does not want it.
• It’s OK to market to people later on, especially if there are consumables (printer toner is one example). You don’t want to overmarket, but that saturation point is different for different segments. Give people a chance to opt out. The opt-out rate should also tell you when you are sending offers too frequently (as you are receiving more opt-outs).

Instawares

500,000 skus online currently. There is a low conversion rate that the owner wants to improve. Owner knows the category tree is messed up and is looking for an information architect to help with this.

• Use smaller thumbnails. For a gallery page of several products, we don’t need to see lots of detail, and you want to keep the bandwidth down for people who are on slower connections.
• Buyers want you to be an expert on what you are selling. Consider adding additional stores and splitting up some of the products between different stores. You can target keywords and SEO better this way.
• Availability of “usually” ships in 1-2 days does not inspire confidence that product is in stock. Either drop the mention of availability entirely, or remove the usually phrase.