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What can I do? I need help!



 
 
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  #1  
Old November 17th 03, 02:37 AM
Sally Smardon
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Default What can I do? I need help!

I am new to website design and would appreciate any suggestions anyone
cares to make about my site, www.thequeenofbeads.com.
What do you think I need to do to increase my sales, are my pictures
good enough, etc. Any and all comments are welcome.

Thanks
Sally
Ads
  #2  
Old November 17th 03, 05:36 AM
Abrasha
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Default

Sally Smardon wrote:

I am new to website design and would appreciate any suggestions anyone
cares to make about my site, www.thequeenofbeads.com.
What do you think I need to do to increase my sales, are my pictures
good enough, etc. Any and all comments are welcome.

Thanks
Sally



Your pictures are good, but all of them are much to large. Not so much in
dimensions, but rather in bytes.

Your thumbnails are around 80K and your larger images are around 250K. Much too
large.

I would like to use my own site as an example. My thumbnails are all around
2K. That's 40 times smaller than yours. Granted, the dimensions are much
smaller, but even if I would increase the width and the length of my thumbs by a
factor of two so they would be more like yours in size, the image would be four
times larger, which would be around 8K, still TEN times smaller than your
thumbs.

My large images are all between 20K and 40K max. And they are much larger than
any of your images.

Largely because of your large images, the pages on your site load extremely
slow, and I have a cable connection with awesome throughput. People are just
not going to sit around and wait for that.

Another annoying thing on your site, is that each and every image on your site
(at least the 20 or so that I checked the ones that I checked) has the same
title on the page, i.e. "untitled". The image source files have their own
individual names of course, as can be seen in your source of the pages. This is
extremely annoying to a person browsing who wants to save several images. They
than have to name all of them. Besides, it also makes management of your site
more difficult, because it is not possible to distinguish one image from the
next easily.

As far as what you have to do to increase your sales; you have to increase your
traffic, just like in a regular retail location. So, you have to market your
site. How do you do that?

Well, for a small site like yours, one of your options is a links page.
Reciprocal links are very important on the Web. And even non reciprocal links.
Why do you think it's called the WEB? It's a community. You are not part of
that community, you just sit there without participating. Many late arrivals to
the Net do this, you are by no means the only one. They do not seem to
comprehend the history, background and the philosophy behind the Net, etc. Part
of why I like to call America, "The Land of Cultural Amnesia"!

You are no destination site like Microsoft, Sony or Apple. And you will never
be. You need links, to you and from you. With links from your site, the web
crawlers, spiders and other robots, will recognize you as a "hub" site. Like a
spider sitting in the center of his web. Do you think that those names like web
crawler, spider, web, etc. were an accident or something cute. No, they are a
metaphor for how the Web was intended to work. Those names are not accidents.
You don't seem to get that.

Take a look at my "resume" page. It's full of links! Because of it, I pull in
a lot of traffic, both to that page, and through it to my site. Almost all of
the links on that page are links that are NOT reciprocal, but only links GOING
FROM my site. Yet that page draws in an enormous amount of traffic. In the
last week it was in fourth place, after my index page, "da Bomb" page, and my
Home page. Of course, "da Bomb" was an anomaly, just a cute gimmick, but even
that post, posted in only a couple of newsgroups increased my daily traffic by a
factor of 3.

The way things are now with your site, you are in the web, but you are not part
of it.

Another way to market is to find out who your audience on the Web may be. In my
case, because I also make and sell Judaica, I try to hang out in places (on the
Web) where Jewish people hang out. You could do something like that for
Christmas ornaments.

I am sure others may have more and/or different suggestions

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com
  #3  
Old November 17th 03, 05:36 AM
m
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Default

Sally Smardon wrote:
I am new to website design and would appreciate any suggestions anyone
cares to make about my site, www.thequeenofbeads.com.
What do you think I need to do to increase my sales, are my pictures
good enough, etc. Any and all comments are welcome.

Thanks
Sally


*Source has noframes section, but nothing in it.
Most search engines won't find your subpages because of this.
See: http://www.highrankings.com/framedsite.htm
The page completely reloads all frames on page-change, so
the frames aren't being used correctly. The idea of frames
is to click on the navigation frame and have a content frame
change, not to reload everything. Frames are just a problem.
Drop them if you have the energy for a rewrite.

*Image based navigation is too slow for people on dialup.
In this case, it's too small to be readable on all browsers.

*Run the images through a sharpen filter in Photoshop or
Gimp (free download, http://www.gimp.org -- and also download
the manual), or IrfanView (easiest to use and free, Google it up.)

*Not a fan of the JS-popup version of thumbnails. See:
http://www.mbstevens.com/howtothumb/ for other ways, and the
reasons why.

*The book you're probably working from is old, old. For
contemporary ways of making websites, see:
http://www.alistapart.com -- archived articles
http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.useit.com/
http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/
http://www.realworldstyle.com/

--
Cheers, mike

  #4  
Old November 17th 03, 10:08 AM
Adrian
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Default

Hi Sally

Agree with all that Abrasha says about image sizes - you need to use
some image editing software to reduce the filesize of the images. The
site is horribly slow to download - I wouldn't have waited if I was
casually browing

You should tell your "Web Designer -- Robert Kohute -- 09042002" that
you're not going to get the exposure you want on the search engines by
including the following keywords in your index page

"Google,,nude,,girls, ,sex"

Also - if I was going to send you money then I'd want to know a bit
more about you, your refunds policy, postage / insurance rates & so
on.. - you need to build confidence for the customer before they will
part with their money.

FWIW your products look very nice - but, as it stands, you website
doesn't do them any favours.

Hope this helps
Adrian
Suffolk UK
 




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