vauxhall-accessories.com

Name of Site/Business: Vauxhall Accessories

Site's Main Purpose: Ecommerce/Sales

Please Review the following:
Does/can the site achieve its main purpose?

Navigation. Is it clear and easy to understand?

Appearance/Attractiveness

Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?



Additional Comments/Notes
The site has been running for a few months now and we're getting steady sales. However, I feel as if we could get many more with the correct SEO and I'm still not 100% about the navigation and home page.

Any critique would be great, thanks

Your site looks great but there are a few things I would do.

I would get rid of the paragraph of text at the top completely.


change it to a H2 or H3 tag, repeat your title tag
Genuine Vauxhall Car Accessories, you want the spiders to get that text as the other top of page instances are in graphics.

Next I would add some products or a few specials under that H tag, like 6 or 9. make them small and neat, thumbnail, one line description, price and buy. I know, its hard with some CMS systems, but you can do it.

then make some static product pages, plain HTML, like a product splash page, the SE's should index these separately so that when someone looks for a specific part, that page will come up. I make these full of content thats different than the buy page. your buy pages really have no content anyway, so I don't thing you have much of a duplicate issue. Link these pages from your site map. Site users don't really need them, but they do help make a sale. Make sure these static product pages have working buy buttons. Because its a manual process, pick important high priced items that people look for. Not a tube of touch up paint.

I've done this over and over and have had millions in sales. (no, you can't get to my site from my profile)

you have the best ecommerce site i've seen in a while, congrats

Urgent: create a 301 redirect from non-www to www version of your site.

In the checkout form, you may want to pre-select UK, since Vauxhalls are almost not sold anywhere else.

On the first step of the checkout, I have indicated a phone number, and it had disappeared in the second step, giving the message "Phone is required".

Also "How Did You Find Us? is required" is over the top and almost violating my privacy, I think. If customers want to tell you, that should be their choice.

Otherwise I find the site quite attractive. Keywords percentage should be OK. There are many products without pictures; I don't think you can sell anything without a picture. In the Heritage category, I would like to see some classic / vintage parts. As a customer, I would like to have a telephone number for support, not a form to fill. You now need to get incoming links to your site.

Hello Taitou,

Very nice website! I really mean that.

But when I look at the HTML output, I would make some small changes.

1. Move the internal CSS code to a stylesheet.
2. Move the javascript to an external javascript file.

If you want to do some more work, you could remove the header
of the website/main table (with the logo and the buttons Home // forum) and
put it insite DIV tags. You could optimize the header for SEO.
Doing that your website should be far more optimized.

I hope you can use my comments.

Greetz

Thank you all very much for the comments

For a lot of these changes, I will have to wait until my superior gets back from italy (lucky guy :P) before we can implement any. However, there are a lot of very useful ideas and suggestions here.

I must say that I've been to other website review forums, but all I got back from them was 'yeah, looks nice, maybe add some orange rollovers...' so it's a very welcome change to see some real suggestions.

Great idea about the text at the top, and putting a few specials one the front page - this has been on my mind for a little while now as most e-shops seem to follow this practice.

The product splash page is an interesting idea, I'll have to look into that more but I can see how it could help with the SEO.

As for the 'how did you find us?', it's very useful for us at the moment, but what would you think to adding a 'no comment' option or similar, just in case they feel it is invading their privacy?

You're completley right about the pictures, I'd say around 70% have pictures now, but I understand that you're very unlikely to sell something without a picture. I've been round all the non-images recently and managed to fish out some pictures for them, but some parts are very hard to find pics for and we don't stock them at our warehouse.

As for classic/vantage parts, that is something we're working on, we have parts for older cars, but nothing older than about 6-8 years at the moment.

There is a telephone number on the site for support, I'll have to check its placement if you say you couldn't see it.

Thanks for all your tips and ideas, especially on SEO and the header/front page. Any more suggestions would be great and I'll try to get you updated on changes we make