Hi all,
Would like some input on my site http://baldeaglegifts.com My site has only been up a few months and am doing pretty good in the traffic, ranking and sells department, but could use the extra input. How about the layout and the load time. Are the colors working with the link colors? I'm a do it yourselfer and appreciate your comments and your time.
Thanks in advance...

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BaldEagleGifts.com

I'd like to offer up a couple of what suggestions for you:

1. Your logo in the upper left corner should contain the name of your business. The fact that the logo is animated may annoy some visitors

2. Ditch the ads along the top of your page. They present your business as a lightweight, uncredible, basement-run operation. They scream that your business is bad and, as such, you need to increase your revenues $0.05 at a time. Chances are you don't make any real money from these anyway.

3. Ditch the 'Feature Sites' links. These are unrelated attempts to grab some affiliate dollars. Whose business is this? Yours, or your advertisers'?

4. You state at the bottom of your site that you do not participate in auctions. I recommend having at least a paragraph or a page explaining why. And, anyway, why not?

5. I would suggest a couple of featured products right on the home page. After you have cleaned up all the affiliate and AdSense stuff, you'll have plenty of extra room for this. Highlight a few of your best sellers, or maybe some items you want to move quickly.

6. Avoid 'techie' statements like "128-bit Secure Socket Layer Credit Card Transaction Through 2CheckOut.com". These typically mean nothing to your customers. State the benefits, not the features. "We use the same level of Internet security as banks when taking your online order" - or something like that.

7. Don't underline anything unless it's a hyperlnk.

8. Your '30 day money back...' link on your home page links to your FAQ. It should link to details about your 30 day money back guarantee.

9. Again, in your FAQ, you throw around details about features of your site and ordering. In particular, references to 2CheckOut. Remove these. Simply state that ordering is completely secure. Not many visitors will know what a transaction server is.

Now that the ugly stuff is out of the way, I think your site is actually quite nice. It's not overly flashy, but that's OK. It's better to be under-flashy than over-flashy any day of the week.

Your product listings are nice, and your pages seem to be well laid out.

I suppose my fundamental objection to your site is how you treat your own products. They are secondary to your AdSense ads and located in a little menu on the left-hand side of the page (which by the way has poor contrast). If I were in your position, the first thing I would try to draw my visitors eyes to would be product categories and probably a couple of current 'specials'.

At any rate, I hope some of my comments were helpful and I wish you the best of luck.

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Robin Eldred
Web Design & Internet Marketing by Apis Design
Websites that work

Thanks alot Robin. Alot of what you said makes sense. Like I wrote before, I'm a do it yourselfer and trying to do the right thing. Greatly apprecitated.

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BaldEagleGifts.com

MoZarko,

Robin makes some good points above; all the big guys start selling right on their main pages--take a look at Amazon's top-level page for a good example. I'd offer my most impressive deal or at least a link to my most popular page...

A good use for a front/main/home page is to double as your "What's New" page; here are our latest products and services, awards we've won, partnerships we've developed and, oh yeah, more stuff to sell.

Selling is the whole point.

Much of the content on your front page appears better suited to your about page; believe me, if people are interested in you and your site, they'll find the about page.

You used a fixed-width design, optimized for an 800 x 600 resolution; I'm always amazed at how many of my clients use the Favorites sidebar in MSIE, effectively reducing any resolution by at least 200/300 pixels, cuttingoff the right sideofyour content.

And with the growing popularity of higher resolutions (by way of large LCD monitors), fixed width designs result in the reverse problem: an oasis of content in a desert of background.

For these reasons, I use percentages in the widths of my tables, usually an 80% table centered in a 100% table. (see http://tesla-pc.com for an example)

You appear to have used CSS to format your font size; again, relative values (%'s work real good) allow you to keep your design, but allow vision-impaired users to enlarge small fonts easily, especially if they have a scroll-wheel mouse (Ctr+scroll--hey, it rhymes!)

The site itself looks good, loads fast and is quite attractive--a nice understated classically classy feel to it that should give your customers the sense that you're a reliable business.

Good luck with every thing and keep up the good work!

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Steve Lewis
NextDesign NYC
http://next-design.com/
What's next in Web Design

It is a given that a lot of the time the choice between relative and fixed sizes is a matter of personal preference, but I'd like to play a little Devil's Advocate to selnyc's comments:

The first argument is consistent appearance. By setting absolutely widths for your tables, you are presenting your users with the same apperance, regardless of their resolution. I believe this to be a plus in terms of memorability and recognizability.

The fact that you are using CSS documents allows impaired users to view your pages the way they want. They will simply overwrite your style sheet with one of their own, so you may as well use exact font sizes instead of percentages.

The second argument is for easier readability of text. You will see that most news-related sites use a fixed width. This is done because it is easier to read shorter line lengths than longer ones. Physical newspapers are shining example of this.

I think a great option is to do what they've done here on WebProWorld. In the top left corner you'll notice 3 buttons for toggling the active style sheet. I like this a lot. It's a bit of extra programming, but well worth it in their case, I think.

Anyway, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I do believe that in your case, because you are selling products, a relative-width layout would be a better choice.


That's just my $0.02 on relative vs. fixed widths.

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Robin Eldred
Web Design & Internet Marketing by Apis Design
Websites that work

Like your suggestions and am in the process of using alot them. I appreciate it. If you or anyone have any other comments and/or suggestions I'm a will'n to listen and learn in bettering my site. Thanks...Alot It sure does help to get comments from others.

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BaldEagleGifts.com