Birmingham Tin Box

[dylacom]

I created the site: paint-tin.co.uk
it is my first project- we have already sold a few products through the website- so it is not that bad I guess-
However I would really appreciate any suggestions on how I can improve the service.

please tell me what you think... be honest as usual

[fisicx]

What an excellent set of products, I really like this.

Trouble is the site looks very homemade. The buttons and icons are very old fashioned and the layout cramped.

In the shop the product description contain the words 'See also:' but without the necessary hyperlink.

You could simplify the whole product lisiting since many of them are duplicated. Instead of the two quatities just make this an option box, this will reduce the size of the page by a half.

I love the gallery of images on the history page but overall the site looks like you just kept adding bits. It's usually a good idea to plan the flow of information so that the paths thorugh the site are logical and intuitive for the visitor. Once this is done you can then wireframe the whole site before plating with the layout. Because you appear to have started with the layout anf then tried to fity all the content a lot of little usability niggles have crept in.

One thing you need to get rid of striaght away is the links page. Many of the links have no relevance to paint tins and you may well find your ranking is adversely affected.

[dylacom]

Thank you for the comprehensive answer- very useful-
need to get back to work then

One more question-CSS based website is better than table-based- that's a fact- but why???
is there a difference in loading?
more search engine friendly ???


my website is more table-based

[fisicx]

Strip out the tables and look at what's left. That's what the search engine sees. Using CSS rather than structural tables means you can retain the semantic flow of information for text readers like the SE robots.

Nothing wrong with using rtable for tabular data as long as you remember that the robots reads left to right one row at a time. If the info for each product is displayed over multiple lines then you can lose a lot of important relevance.

[dylacom]

I decided to change the layout of the website- the content will remain the same - but I am using a different template and CSS- (and want to try to do better optimization of the headers, titles, content etc)

my question is
will search engines like when I change the website completely?- the one which is online at the moment is recognized by Search Engines. we get about 30 visitors a day- it is live just for a month- I know it is not a lot but I do not want the site to become not recognizable completely.

the shopping cart will remain the same, as I can't do much with it- apart from what you suggested.

[ronin1770]

yeah - robots favor Divs as opposed to tables now

[PDC]

Should be fine. Try to use the same page names [urls] if you can.

[dylacom]

still doing some changes- please take a look at the website now

paint-tin.co.uk

[fisicx]

Still looks very dated. All you are doing is changing the layout - there seems to be not though about the site architecture and information grouping. And you really need to take time to create your copy, it;s this more than anything that lets you down.

Remember, successful products don't rely on their packaging, it's the user experience with the product that matters.

[dylacom]

Originally Posted by fisicx

Still looks very dated. All you are doing is changing the layout - there seems to be not though about the site architecture and information grouping. And you really need to take time to create your copy, it;s this more than anything that lets you down.

Remember, successful products don't rely on their packaging, it's the user experience with the product that matters.

ok... not easy

what do you mean by saying

Originally Posted by fisicx

And you really need to take time to create your copy, it;s this more than anything that lets you down.

sorry not quite obvious to me