Review of my website

[JazzyJust]

Could you please review my website - www.baizeltd.com.

Any feedback or advice would be appreciated.

[AstarothSolutions]

Personally not keen on the heavy use of green but there is the obvious reason for it.

Your main logo is suffering from some compression artifcating which you should be able to easily clean up.

The left hand navigation isnt working correctly in FireFox - the background/ mouse over is being duplicated so you are getting 1.5 instances of it - works fine in IE 6 so just need to tweek your code. I am personally not keen on the way that the sub menus are displayed with the same background image as you are using on the mouse over background for the main menu - I personally would have expected them to be indented or more signficantly different if the rest of the menu is to stay there.

Your layout is defined using tables - general thinking at the moment is that this should be done with CSS rather than tables both from a search engine and useability perspective.

I am not sure if the first thing I read on your landing page should be about signing up for an account... it immediately makes me assume that you have a forum or such as I wouldnt expect to be invited to register for an e-commerce site unless I was about to buy (and then there are plenty who say that registration shouldnt even be done then)

Your product images look a little washed out - I am surprised your suppliers dont have better images for you to use. Are you intending to add more copy about each product? At the moment the product pages look fairly empty with the header at the top and then a small image off on the far right (this is particularly noticable on my widescreen monitor)

http://baizeltd.com/catalog/icons/error.gif is coming up as a dead link

Why use the american DOB format if you are aimed at the UK market? Plus as a customer I would want to know why you need my DOB at all.

You have a news letter check box but done say if I have to check it to say I want it or check it to say I dont want it.

If you have only a single shipping method I would reword that whole box as with "flat rate" and "best rate" in there it suggests that there is more than one.

The overall ordering process though is straight forward, it is good to see your address and phone number on every page.

I am surprised that there is no products actually advertised on your landing page though

[marksteadman]

Hiya Justin.

Looks like you're using osCommerce. If this is the case, it might be worth looking into a URL rewriting plugin that will give you search-engine-friendly links, instead of using things like ?cPath=21&osCsid=c5fd6ea1a595e8dd324f3d7c76943ae9.

Not quite sold on the little Polaroid image thing. You've also got a few broken images dotted around the place.

If you're after more specific advice, it might be worth mentioning what area of critique you're looking for.

Cheers,
-Mark

[JazzyJust]

Mark,

Yes I'm using OsCommerce for my site.

Where would I find the URL plug in?

Also what do you mean by this: -

"If you're after more specific advice, it might be worth mentioning what area of critique you're looking for"

AstarothSolutions,

In regards to the payment side of things I'm looking into the new PayPal Pro.

Link provided: - https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-pro-overview-outside

[marksteadman]

Below is a link for a contrib that will transform your URLs into search-engine-friendly ones:
http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2796

"If you're after more specific advice, it might be worth mentioning what area of critique you're looking for"
What I mean by this is that, if you want people to review your site it might be best to ask them what areas they should look at - many people use this thread just to promote their site and increase backlinks, so to ensure you don't get tarred with the same brush, you coudl try asking people what sort of comments you're after, ie: design, accessibility, copy, etc.

Cheers,

[JazzyJust]

Thanks Mark, I'm not looking for any backlinks or anything, I'm just looking for peoples opinions on the actual site's design/layout and how I could improve the site, also to see if it would get them to buy from me instead of Joe Bloggs who is charging more but has a fancy & eye catching site.

I want to attract customer so I can make the business grow so any advice would be appreciated.

[www.infoebookstore.co.uk]

Originally Posted by JazzyJust

also to see if it would get them to buy from me instead of Joe Bloggs who is charging more but has a fancy & eye catching site.

Credibility

People are more likely to buy from an established company (or at least one appearing to be) than someone operating from home.

You need to think about why people are prepared to buy from Amazon for example, people expect the goods to arrive, free postage, returns policy etc.

You need to sort out the image problems, several X boxes doesn't look good and I am not keen on having lots of categories with nothing in them, if you don't have any products don't have a category.

What is the main competition doing? Can I buy the same products from eBay cheaper? At least on eBay you can get a feel for the likely service from feedback and previous sales.

Good luck with this

Jim