Bewenched - 7:24 am on Nov 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

I've started making mainly design changes to our site, it's been somewhat of a slow process over the last month as this is the time of year when all of our manufacturers release new products and we have to get them in the database to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

Most of our changes so far have been to our product pages... Mainly taking out a lot of tables and using css and divs. Really cleaned it up visually in my opinion. We added breadcrumbs and schema tags and some html5 markup. Once the core pages are cleaned up menus are next. Not that the navigation is going to change that much, but css and ajax will be fun to play with and the thought of HTML5 and it's ability to display well on mobile devices will at least keep us from having to maintain two sets of code. (crossing fingers) I just dont want to push the new technology to quickly.. the bleeding edge is not where I want to be.

We've started to see some improvement in traffic and sales are picking up. Maybe google likes it better or maybe customers do. There's no real way to tell.

I just hope that Google doesn't slam us for adding large volumes of products... we are ecommerce and new widgets come out all the time. Unfortunately they also get discontinued a lot as well... normally I'd love to just delete those items from the database, but the sales team gets calls from customers looking for those products and if they cant easily see that it is no longer available then they spend too much time trying to hunt something down that's long gone... we do put a no index tag on those product pages.

Just hoping that Google really likes leaner cleaner layouts.