Forgive me, Head Bear, but I've got half a hunch that the reason you want this site reviewed on here is because you have doubts about the overall quality and potential for success as far as what you're getting. If that's the case, I'm sure you've pretty well realized that they're very well-justified suspicions on your part.
I'm also making the assumption that you're not a web designer, because someone else's logo is on the site and because you've mentioned that you hired someone you know. This means that I have no idea of your level of knowledge, so I'm going to play it safe and explain everything as thoroughly as I can. Please don't take this as an insult to your intelligence; that's not the intention.
Normally, I would never make this recommendation, but in this case it actually serves to illustrate one of the biggest problems with your site.
Before you go to bed one night (or when you're really tired one day), open up the home page of your site. The effect all of the animation has on your eyeballs will show you what a lot of other people will see when they look at your site. There's simply too much motion, used in such a way as to draw attention away from where it's supposed to be.
As far as your designer's ad goes, I've never supported anyone's logic except for MarcieZoob's as far as why an ad should be there. You paid them to do work, and unless their status as a designer will enhance your reputation in the community (which is highly unlikely), then put the kibosh on the design link.
You will get punished by search engines that don't recognize querystrings. Querystrings are the part from the ? on in each URL of your site, and are used to present varying content (this way, only one page would need to be created to display 200 or so, since dynamic content changes.)
So, for the search engines that ignore your querystrings, most of your URLs are going to appear as
http://www.bearwithus.us/index.cfm , and that's all they'll see.
You've got a typo in your meta keywords tag on your home page. It says "Bearinton" instead of "Bearington". The meta keywords tag is a piece of HTML code that some search engines look at when they're looking for the keywords and phrase a page should be found under (although marginally used at best, so it's not an overly big deal).
Speaking of your code, there is an inordinate amount of white space in it (usually the sign of an automatic code editor such as FrontPage). This will hurt you both in terms of load time and search-engine friendliness, since your code is longer and harder to read.
As far as being ready for search engines goes, your site isn't. Besides the querystring issue mentioned earlier, you've got issues involving the various HTML tags that the engines access.
The title tags (this is the tag that generates the title of a page for the search engine and for the web browser) contain your company name and not much else;
your meta description tag (this is the tage that generates the description of a page that some search engines e.g. Google use) contain very little actual description and in many cases are left blank. (As in the content of the description tag is nothing at all.)
If your site is VeriSign-secured and you paid for the SSL (Secure Socket Layer--this is the part that encrypts sensitive data, such as credit card data, so that it can be processed securely), you overpaid bigtime. I don't blame you for this in any way, shape or form: VeriSign/Network Solutions is the longest-serving company for both domain names and SSLs. However, the good folks at
www.instantssl.com can hook you up with your SSL starting at $49 USD/year.
I'm Canadian myself, so I'm not overly familiar with the players in this industry and what might be the best solution for you. However, there are a few members on here such as Corey Bryant and Steven Allen who really know their stuff and would probably be able to give you the correct guidance (I can try, but not being American, I'm not likely to be of that much use to you.)
Deleting a product is confusing, since there's no way to tell what to click on after the check box to update the cart. A simple "update cart" button would suffice that way, in order to allow quantity updates, etc.
The cart page generated an error for me after I added something to the cart:
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = 42000 (Syntax error or access violation)
[TCX][MyODBC]You have an error in your SQL syntax near '' at line 1
SQL = "select name, imagesmall, imagebig from products where productid ="
Data Source = "FOLDER12352"
The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFQUERY), occupying document position (325:9) to (325:56) in the template file D:\CCV5\SYSTEM\SITE_CODE\CART\DSP_CART.CFM.
Date/Time: 12/04/05 00:25:55
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
Remote Address: 72.141.1.243
HTTP Referer:
http://www.bearwithus.us/index.cfm?f...1215&pageid=37
Query String: fuseaction=cart&cartaction=add&id=1215&product=5&q ty=1&tid=3852
And at this point, I'm incredibly confused. You have a "Verisign Secure Site" logo on the home page of your site, but now when I reach the checkout page I'm being told you use PayPal?
And to make matters even more confusing, the checkout page does actually indicate that you're using an SSL. I see an https:// in the URL and a lock on the bottom (Internet Explorer's sign of a secure site.)
I also don't know if some fields are required and some aren't on this form. All fields should be clearly labelled as required/not required.
Which leads me to my next problem. I'm Canadian, so I'm not from a US state. But the form doesn't seem to like that. It unilaterally cleared out my home province of "Ontario" as well as my company name, the checkbox for my shipping information and billing information being the same, and my special instructions.
I'm also pretty sure that, as an international customer, you couldn't ship a bear to me for $5.00 via UPS. You should look into having your costs calculated as well.
And now the part I really hate to say, but it's what I believe and if I don't tell you what I feel, I'm doing you a disservice.
To fix the problems that I discovered on the surface would cost you far too much and take far too long to fix, simply because my discovering these problems means there are many others.
You need to rebuild your site from the ground up, and hire a web designer/developer who knows what he/she is doing to help you. This is in no way a solicitation of service (I'm booked solid right through Christmas and into January), but there are quire a few people on this board that, if you made the request, could help you.
Put a post in the Freelance Work Needed/For Hire board. Someone's bound to be able to help you.
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