PDA

View Full Version : Please help. Website help needed.


Ralphy Boy
11-09-2007, 09:14 PM
I'm probably posting this in the wrong forum, but the Media Center looks a bit like a ghost town and Tech-committee is apparently for moderators of this site only. I need some help with the website for a store that my wife and I own. She runs the store, picks out all of the products and meets with vendors and so on. She really never wanted to be online, but I insisted and she is now seeing that there is value in it. I've pushed for it from the beginning. I have a job that pays the bills but at night and on weekends, I load product on to our website and take care of the books. I'm trying to boost the sales via the internet but I'm clueless on internet marketing. Yeah, I can pay for Yahoo and we have, but I'm needing help with a few things. I'd appreciate any advice I could get. I paid like $600 for the website (hey we're a small business) and $30 a month for hosting so I don't get much in the way of support.
I'll ask a few questions below and you can either reply or email me.

The store is Generations Decor & Gifts and the website is www.generationsdecor.com. She sells women's crap, so while I'll apologize for the shameless plug there, I also realize that most likely not a person on here would buy anything she sells so I'm not likely to benefit in that way.

My "Webalizer" report says we had 54,605 hits in September, but what really is a "hit"? Does it just mean that we are buried in the search results on page 89 of Google or does that mean we were on the first page? It says we had 624 Unique Visitors, 787 Visits and 11,554 pages.

What amount of visitors should we convert to paid customers? Is there a place that has this kind of info that I don't have to pay for to find out?

I've heard that "content" boosts you up in the organic rankings so I've thought about ways to add that. Is that correct?

I need advice on whether to add a bulletin board or a blog to it to drive up traffic. Will that really help? I've heard it will, but really don't know to what degree. She sells some food products so I thought about adding a recipe exchange. She also sells home decor & bath/body so I thought about putting something out there about those things as well either decorating advice or whatever.

I can add a BB fairly easy but it seems like blogs are more common for businesses. What is the main differences as far as operating and bandwith? I've seen on here where the "avatars are getting out of hand" and don't want to screw up the store or server.

Is there a place that I can link to published information without getting in trouble?

Is a flash site realistic for an e-store? I'm afraid of spending money on a fancy site and don't want to do anything to lose the traffic we are getting now.

I can't afford to spend a lot for a re-design of the site, but I am considering doing something.

I don't speak "techno" and since everything I've found on the web is written that way, i get lost in the language.

my email is jeff@generationsdecor.com

Thanks for any help you can give and if this needs to be moved to some other forum, feel free, but please email me where it is sent to.
Jeff

Phobia
11-09-2007, 09:41 PM
I bought a couple grand worth of merchandise. I hope it ships quickly.

I don't really know websites all that well. For all intents and purposes yours is pretty clean.

But the side menu really runs together. You need something to create some separation. I don't know if that's contrasting colors, boxes, or just more space between options. Finally, feel free to mix up the text size. It seemed like everything on that page was the same size. My eye didn't really know where to go first.

kcfan82
11-09-2007, 10:08 PM
The website looks pretty clean, although phobia is right and you should maximize the width so you don't have to scroll down 10 pages to look at everything and have 6 inch bars on either side.

A hit is usually someone accessing your site, but with google websearch bots and other search engines they basically scour the internet searching for content to add you to the google search engine so those also count as "hits".

I would suggest instead of completely redoing your website, just get a content manager online for free. I think we talked about this on the server thread but there are a million content managers out there that are precompiled websites and web hosting adds the database.

Very easy for basic end users to manipulate and add free and purchased add ons to.

A couple of content managers I know of are dotnetnuke and joomla.

Ralphy Boy
11-09-2007, 11:34 PM
Thanks. It's hard to get people that know us to give very objective opinions. They all just say "it looks nice" or "it looks great", but most of them aren't internet shoppers so I can't expect much from them.

Its a cheap site and I can't change the font size of anything in the far left column. I've been told that most search engines search the main page, so it's longer because we're trying to put a lot of content on it. I hate the way the categories display on the left and I'm trying to figure out about 5 or so categories that the rest can be sub-categories of. I've tried to change things up a bit by underlining and using different colored fonts but I have kept most of the text the same type of font for the sake of it being somewhat uniform.

Its a foo foo store, so I have to put up pretty pictures as I'm trying to replicate the physical location to the internet as best I can. When they walk in the store, she's got candles & music going so their sense of smell & sound are engaged. She puts out food samples to engage their taste and obviously the rest is visual. On the internet, since I don't have music playing, I have to rely on the only sense I can reach and that is sight. That being said, it's not as visually appealing as it could be and I have talked to a couple of designers about re-doing it.

I do realize that you are right, there is too much text.

Ralphy Boy
11-10-2007, 01:59 AM
I would suggest instead of completely redoing your website, just get a content manager online for free. I think we talked about this on the server thread but there are a million content managers out there that are precompiled websites and web hosting adds the database.

Very easy for basic end users to manipulate and add free and purchased add ons to.

A couple of content managers I know of are dotnetnuke and joomla.

I guess I don't know what a content manager is.