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Old 09-08-2008, 03:36 PM
amxfan amxfan is offline
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Default Re: MothersFamilyRings.com | Getting ready for the Christmas Season

To be honest I was not real sure about replying to this or not as you're going to do a redesign next year and that is not all that far away. I'm not sure what all you are planning to do on your redesign but I do not think you need to change much.

My thoughts

1. The page layout is fine and the rings on the page really stand out and draw your eyes to them.
2. The colors on the site I did not really care for. The blue is too light of blue in the logo. With the lightness of it, it looks kind of fuzzy. The blue on the gray in the left nav bar I do not think it goes well. In the information box, the medium gray on light gray is also not a great combination. You are selling mothers rings, celebration, joy, etc. Gray is a dull, rainy day, dreary color. You may want to rethink these choices.
3. Your footer navigation on the main page looks like an afterthought and seems to be tucked away into a corner. On your product pages it is spread out across the bottom. I would change the main page to match the product pages.
4. On your product pages, I clicked 10 stone off of the main page. Before I moved to the product page, the anchor text on the page 'ten stone'. Is ten stone a key search phrase you are trying to rank for? Maybe ten stone mothers rings or ten stone gemstone rings, or better yet mothers rings ten stone would be better. Now to the product page. You have the same issue here. Looking at your h1 tags, you have ten stone. Again this is the header of that page. Try and put some key words in it.
5. Your title on this product page, you have ten stone mothers ring. This is okay, but the closer to the beginning that your keywords fall, the more weight they have. So swap mothers ring with ten stone.
6. You may want to put a 'nofollow' on your images as text links would be more beneficial.
7. On your product layout page, right now your cart is set up to where the words 'more info' are used as anchor text to your cart. This is not doing you any good unless you are trying to rank for the words more info. If possible link from a short description of the product.
8. SEO friendly URL's are a must and would be one of the first things I would incorporate.
9. Title tags need to be added to aid in accessibility.
10. Your 'Home' links to the index.html. This can lead to duplicate content issues. You also have a canonicalization issue.
11. I like your contact page. The map, address, phone number add credibility.
12. Your default navigational buttons - the orange in the buttons do not fit anything in your site.
13. I would create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN.
14. You need to add good alt / title text to your product images.
15. You may want to create a robots.txt file to ban bad bots and to stop good bots from crawling areas of your site that you do not want crawled / indexed.
16. You need to disable directory indexing as seen at this URL http://www.mothersfamilyrings.com/images/ . Depending on your hosting provider, this can be done in Cpanel. Click on Index Manager under the header Advanced.

Side note
You said your dad is a gem cutter. Do you offer lapidary services? I did not see it mentioned on your page and thought I would ask.

All in all the site is not bad. The colors need some work and there is some tweaking to be done. I like the idea of adding testimonials, although I do not pay them any mind as many times they are fake.