Forum Moderators: not2easy
Well as my title and description say, I need help revamping our site. I believe our site is good, but could be a lot better. We seem to be losing users along the way through our site and they don't seem to be wanting to buy something from our site. I would like to post my url here but I know its not allowed ;) but if you want to stickie me, I will send you my url.
My boss wants to hire a web design firm to help us out with what we need improvment on. But I thought before we got and spend thousands of dollars I would do some searching and see if I can come up with anything to help before we start spending money.
I was curious if anyone knows any good sites that could help me know what to look for and give me ideas of what could be turning off our customers that visit our site. We currently get around 200 hits a day and no sales :(. Are there any tutorials or perhaps anyone who could just look at our site and give us a few pointers?
Thanks in advance for all your help :)
Wes
Otherwise, keep reading Webmasterworld and you'll pick up a lot. I'd focus on threads that discuss improving conversions, implementing tracking and doing logfile analysis as well as basic design-related threads (CSS, markup validation, reducing load times, etc.)
It wouldn't hurt to do some basic competitive analysis, too. How are your competitors' sites structured, what do they have in common, which sites if any stand head and shoulders above the rest (and if so, why -- better content, easier to use, what?)
Good luck!
Ask them to come up with a proposal of work and an estimate of the amount of time/cost involved.
When you have received a number of these you'll find that you now have your 'plan of action'and you can then decide whether to do it yourselves or involve a third party.
IMO, this is the ideal approach as you get a variety of ideas of how the site should look and you're also at the best possible position to start the revamping - you know what you want and have a good idea of the costs involved.
You can sticky me your URL if you like and I'll give you some feedback - I'm no expert but getting feedback from 'user's' is also a good idea, ask as many people as you know to have a look at it and give you feedback.
HTH
Joop
First impression is that this site is new (2004 launch) and you are having the same problems as many others are experiencing not showing well in the SERPs(search engine results pages) despite the site being indexed by Google.
Some people believe that there is a 'sandbox' effect in operation with Google (do a search on this site for this term if you are unfamiliar with it).
The google toolbar doesn't show any page rank for this site either.
If I had this site I would not start paying thousands of dollars just yet to a 3rd party company. If there is a budget I would spend it on getting listed in web directories and perhaps paying for links displayed to your site from high PR sites (again do a search for PR - 'page rank' if you are unfamiliar with this term).
The sites design is quite good, although I would make some of the images a bit smaller and tweak the titles to be more search engine friendly - do you need your company name on every page title?
Also I would create more content pages for this site. eg if you sell blue widgets I would write pages of information related to blue widgets.
I dont know when the site was actually launched but if its 2004 and was after Winter time then I'd say its early days yet!
After looking at the site and if you are getting 200 visitors a day (not hits or bots crawling your site like Google) then this is not a bad start at all.
Pay Per Click may be a solution for the moment. In the meantime write some good content and build up some quality links.
Thanks agian for your post, definately some food for thought.
Wes
