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conceptress
Joined: Apr 22, 2006
# Posts: 9
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Posted: 2006-Apr-23 08:27
Name of Site/Business: ScrappyMax
Site's Main Purpose: Ecommerce/Sales
Please Review the following:
Does the home page sufficiently convince people to go further into the site?
Navigation. Is it clear and easy to understand?
Appearance/Attractiveness
Typos and grammar
Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?
Additional Comments/Notes
We've been in business for a little over a year and due to a problem with our previous cart, we had to change providers. We seem to be stuck ranked as a 2 by Google (both with the old cart and new), and I'm looking for any suggestions as to how to increase our rankings. Our main page changes content frequently, and we are always adding new items.
Lastly, is the navigation overwhelming or pretty clear? I appreciate any and all feedback.
Oh - and I've posted several reviews as well. 
Have a great day!
Keleigh
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JQ
Staff
Joined: Mar 11, 2001
# Posts: 2765
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Posted: 2006-Apr-24 00:44
Hi, Keleigh, welcome to the forums and thanks for jumping in and giving some quality reviews already.
I love your site! It's one of the nicest ones I've seen in a while. It's hard to pick nits, but a few suggestions...
The dog for the logo is adorable. But I think I would go with a circle instead of an oval.
The color contrast is overall a bit dark. How about making the circle around Scrappy and maybe the starburst around the $4.99 shipping graphic a nice contrasting orange?
How about a pic of you with Scrappy on the "about us" page to give that human touch?
Once I got to the forums, I couldn't find a way back and had to manually take the forum subdomain out of the address bar to return.
Easter is over. Be sure to removed seasonal promotions promptly or the site looks stale.
I'd like to see more articles more prominently featured. Tutorials and pics of examples (ways to use brads, crimpers, etc.) and even a "new to scrapbooking" section. Give people ideas and (of course) inspire them to spend some money on your goodies.
You have a good list of resources (links) but I would consider having them open in a new window so people don't wander away and not come back.
My mom is totally into scrapbooking. Too bad her last major technology upgrade was from a manual to an electric typewriter. If she were online, she'd probably spend a small fortune on your site.
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rez
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
# Posts: 26
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Posted: 2006-Apr-24 03:00
Q1.Does the home page sufficiently convince people to go further into the site?
It convinced me, it has a good look for this kind of business.
Q2.Navigation. Is it clear and easy to understand?
The side menu works well and the top links are clear and easy to understand.
Q3.Appearance/Attractiveness
The site design is well suited to the subject matter. I'm not sure about the
use of the dog's image, is there a reason for this?
Q4.Typos and grammar
In the 'ScrappyMax Winners!' - 'latest' is spelt 'lastest'.
Q5.Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?
The content is relevant. You have duplicate meta tags on each page. Google
will not like this.
I tried validating the first page using the W3C validator (http://validator.w3.org) and it failed. The search engines like clean code so
you should look into cleaning up the pages.
Hope this helps....
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activesportsman
Joined: Apr 21, 2006
# Posts: 17
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Posted: 2006-Apr-25 07:21
OUTSTANDING!( by the way how do you make those smilies work?) No obvious links, (ie: I'M PROMOTING SOMEBODY ELSE'S STUFF)
Piss on that round and orange thing, your site is good the way it is!!
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conceptress
Joined: Apr 22, 2006
# Posts: 9
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Posted: 2006-Apr-25 16:12
Thank you so much for your reviews! There are some great suggestions that we'll be implementing shortly, and the misspelling is already fixed.
I do have one question. What do you mean by duplicate meta tags? Is that on the same page, where search engines would see "stickers" and "scrapbook stickers" as duplicates? Or is it because they're the same across the site and don't change from page to page?
We went with the dog for two reasons: when people see our logo, they remember it - it's different in this industry, and pet scrapbooking is an exploding market as more people treat their pets like kids.
Glad(?) to know you couldn't find your way back from the forums - the shop button at the top takes you there, but if YOU couldn't figure it out, our customers will definitely have a problem. I originally had the logo linking back but thought that might be a problem. I'll add that link back.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses! We're trying so hard to make this the best scrapbooking site out there!
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newtvail
Joined: Jan 07, 2006
# Posts: 303
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Posted: 2006-Apr-25 22:53
The meta content (title, description, keywords if you use them) need to be different for each page and related directly to that page. The search engines penalize you for using the same ones on each page and for using ones that don't directly relate to the content of the page.
I like the site too. I do feel that in addition to being a little dark, the home page is a little to content-dense. Probably easier for a person to understand if there was less stuff and more white/blank space on the page. The internal pages are a little more open and so are lots easier on my eyes.
If you expect visitors (and hopefully, buyers) who are not already very familiar with scrapbooking, a page or three explaining just what it is and how it is done might help you.
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conceptress
Joined: Apr 22, 2006
# Posts: 9
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Posted: 2006-Apr-25 23:15
Thanks for the explanation and critique! I've been wondering if the main page was too busy. I'm just not certain how to balance content for search engines with ease of use for customers.
A "how-to" scrapbook article is on my (LONG) list of to-dos.
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newtvail
Joined: Jan 07, 2006
# Posts: 303
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Posted: 2006-Apr-27 03:04
Design the site and content for people. The search engines will like you better for it.
I know what you mean about the long to-do list. The whole eCommerce and build-a-web-site things have lots more moving parts than I ever imagined they would when we started ours.
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pagerank10
Joined: Apr 27, 2006
# Posts: 6
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Posted: 2006-Apr-27 16:23
I really like the site and was amazed at the amount of products avalable for crait and scrapbooks, the funny thing is i cant say im interested in the type of products you sell, but I still found myself browsing around at your products... which is a great sign!
I can imagine your sales conversion rates are failry high as you concentrate on such a small area of the market.
I cant really fault the site at all apart from when I clicked on the Home link I got the following error.
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0005'
Invalid procedure call or argument: 'Mid'
D:DOMAINS35316WWWROOT../../ecommerce/_v_4_0/incfiles/functions_SEO.asp, line 18
Lee
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