Art supplies and educational children's toys: www.storyboardtoys.biz

Please, give me any suggestions at all. Design, verbiage, SEO, whatever...

Let me know if I can return the favor.

Thanks!

CJ,

Wow. Not only a great site, but a great product as well (I am surrounded by teachers and principals as friends and family).

The only thing that bothered me was the fact that "store front" and "news" opened new windows. I always end up hitting the wrong scroll bar when websites do this, and that closes the window I am trying to scroll. Just a pet peev of mine. Maybe no one else cares.

Other than that I think you've done a great job managing a TON of content. I think the overall "look" will be inviting for teachers as will all the student art.

I'm going to send my sister a link LOL.

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Mike Freeman
Space City Airbrush
www.spacecityairbrush.com

Hi...good work managing your product and content. what i would perhaps suggest is using some kind of slight border to break your products up a bit more. also, maybe try playing with font sizes, styles and colours a bit...get out of the generic link styles.

i don't understand why the 'storefront' page opens in a new window...that doesn't seem necessary.

good work on making a valid site...good luck!

Mike and Ran: Thank you! You're very kind and I appreciate your encouragement and suggestions.

About links opening in new windows: Okay, I've decided I agree with you and I've removed that problem (on 148 pages!) There won't be any more of that on my webpage. Per my wife's suggestion, I took this opportunity to replace the term "Storefront" with the term "Online Store" in the navigation bar.

I'm still thinking about how best to add borders or shading to differentiate where one product ends and the next begins on the main store page.

Anybody else got suggestions? SEO ideas?

Great site! Lot's of content - which is a great start from the SEO perspective.

From looking at your page titles and meta descriptions I would say you have done these more from the perspective of explaining to customers (which is good) than from the SEO perspective.

Not saying you should stop explaining what the page is - just do it in a way that uses targetted keywords - and only targetted keywords.

You need to take a step back and think about what your potential customers may search for. Broadly there will be two types:
1. Those that know of your product and are searching for it
2. Those that do not know of your product but are looking for something - and your product would fit the bill if only they knew of it!

Think about what terms either of these may search for and start noting them all down. Then take out a days subscription to Wordtracker and research them in depth for popularity and competition.

Once you have refined your list and got down to the chosen few keyword phrases, start picking one page of your site for each keyword phrase. For each page note what phrase you are going after for that page.

Then whatever phrase you are going after for that page, make sure that phrase is prominent in the page title, the meta description, headings on the page and content text on the page. You can use http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html for checking your keyword density

Using that tool on your homepage I can see that 'educational toy' would be a target keyword phrase - but you should try and get density for target 2 word phrases up to around 5%. (btw better to optimise for 'educational toys' rather than 'educational toy')

Treat the page title as a precious resource - every word in there (and the order) should be thought out from an SEO perspective.

Apologies if I'm telling you stuff you already know.

Good Luck!

CJ - the other thing you should think about if you really want to improve ranking is to get a better domain name. If you have keywords in your domain name that will help enormously with the rankings.

Currently your domain name storyboardtoys probably communicates to you what the site is about, but I tried typing "story board toys" and "storyboard toys" in Wordtracker to see how often the term is searched for and it came back with a big zero.

You should try and get the product branding 'Arthouse' and a popular generic search term into your domain name - e.g. domain name arthouseeducationaltoys.com is available. It's not exactly short and memorable - but it would help to pull you in search traffic.

Wow - Thank you Byzantium for giving me a lot of ideas! I'm back from our "Labor Day" holiday, and now I've implemented some of them...

You suggested: "Then take out a day's subscription to Wordtracker and research [the keywords] in depth for popularity and competition."

That's a really great suggestion! I wish I'd done that a long time ago.

With my new Wordtracker subscription I managed to come up with about twenty-five decently strong and relevant keyword-phrases. What a frustrating experience!!! Some of my content just doesn't seem to line up organically with what people are searching for. For example, the ONLY high scoring keyword phrase I found for crayons was "where are crayons made", and I just can't believe that'll bring me paying customers. I re-optimized a page to give it a try...

I've got about 125 pages of content, so I'd like to find at least another 100 keyword phrases.

I haven't yet found any new keyword that'd significantly improve the home-pages. (There are actually two domains. The store is ".biz" instead of ".com" - until two weeks ago the store was on a "yahoo store" sub-domain. One index page is optimized for "educational toy" and the other for "educational toys", as you suggested.)

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Anybody else have suggestions for improvements? Remember to let me know if I can review your site in return.

I like the looks of your site. As a Mom I would like to know right off if you sell to individuals. This kind of toy is seen more in schools so maybe something could be said that encouarges parents and grandparents to buy. Also it would be helpful to have the dimensions of the buildings and the height of the dolls in the descriptions.

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Heidi
www.precious-child.com Children's clothing boutique

Hiya

I didn't get a chance to read everyone else's reply to your post - so the stuff I might post could be repetitive - apologies

- the LHS menu feels un-organised.
the font is too big I think. if it was done with the header in bold like you have done, then the list below it should be in smaller font.

- any chance of aligning the (order) button to the far right of the page?

- add a contact us page, it will give the buyer a sense of security

The images are so good - very clean layout - and I really like the colours.

Good work

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BlackBerry Pearl 8100 - Latest Device
Free HSDPA 3G Data CardS - broadband on the move

Very interesting concept and site.

The site is pleasing to the eye but I find navigating it confusing. I understand you have over 100 pages. However, it would be nice to have a way of knowing where you are in the site so that you can back up 1 or 2 levels as desired. You could use a drop down menu on the side nav bar when you select an option to help a user know where they are. Or, like webproworld does in the forum, put links across the top of the page to let you know which menu selections you have made.

I found myself going back to the same pages trying to find my way around the site. Needless backing tracking that causes user fatigue and may reduce the number of sales.