Would appreciate if you guys can help me critique on a website that we are working on.

http://www.rctoyhouse.com

We understand there's a lot of work to do, in terms of the design, etc... but what would you suggest?

In terms of SEO, what I did was figure out the most searched terms on yahoo/google, and try to incorporate all of those search terms with content.

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The first thing I noticed is the time the page took to load. It was very slow on a dial-up connection. I do not know much about what type of connection most of your visitors would have, but it is something to be looked into. The reason for the slow load time is the file size of virtually all the images on your home page. They are huge for so small images. It is best if you reduced the file sizes of the images using some good graphics program.

Secondly, I must say the site has got an amateurish look about it. Try and jazz up the look. At present some folks at least might not take the site seriously.

Your information and help pages are missing.

Do increase the size of the font of the introductory text on the home page. Make sure you use the same font and colours and overall look on all the pages of the site.

Reduce the length of the title of the page. This would do for the title:
RCTOYHOUSE - All Your RC Needs Under One Roof!
Better if you made RC into Radio Controlled as most folks would use those words to do searches.

Take the rest of the text from the title and add it to the META keywords tag. Also add a META description tag.

These are the things that need to be looked into first. I do believe you have a good thing going; just a few tweaks and you could be on the way. All the best!

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it's cool mate .... how old r u ? :)

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Hiya
Its a fun site! In terms of where you've placed everything it looks like navigation is easy and comprhensive.

In terms of design there's a few things you could do to make it a bit more polished.
- Try to make the header, footer and main content all the same width.
- Perhaps use your css to make a more modern font (arial?) - using the default IE fonts and colours can (IMHO) potentially give the site an amateurish feel.
- Your css can go in an external file
- and perhaps put your buttons as text or use a slightly less bulky font as they're not that easy to read
The colours are cool though, the pictures are great and the overall layout works well for me! You've just solved my birthday and christmas present worries for my other half for the next couple years!

You have a great idea for a business, the site has good products, the design needs quite a bit of help.

1. Overall color scheme. The green is hard on the eyes, and doesn't help the flow of the content, work on more pleasing and nuetral colors.

2. Text. In both your images, and your content, there is no clean consistent use of an easy to read text. You need to focus on ease of use and managing the visitors eye. Clean up the header especially, and move to more controlled text through CSS, as a poster above mentioned.

3. Shopping Cart. Get your own, using Yahoo shopping after hosting this your self looks awful, especially with the change in layout when going to Yahoo.

4. Links. Your bottom links for about, contact us and so on don't work. Fix that immediately. That's a major issue, and should have been the first few pages you completed.

You have great products, now you need a professional to help you with the design of your commerce site, done right, I think you could do very well with your business.

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We offer a total eCommerce solution with eCommerce Web Design using Pinnacle Cart

I'm 20, just finished my 2nd year of college at USC business school.

Thanks for all the great suggestions. Basically, we had to learn everything from scratch. 3 weeks ago, All we had was dreamweaver, yahoo merchant account, and no knowleedge whatsoever in designing a website. We'll look into all of that and hopefully we can make it look great.

Once we have most of the pages working, what kind of professionals would you recommend? We're operating in a tight budget, as most of our funds are all going towards products.

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For your first site, it's not bad. I'm not sure how much you've invested in this current layout, but you may want to look into an E-Commerce package and someone that can help you implement it to take orders.

Feel free to contact me if you'd like some advice directly regarding your site.

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the site is good and attractive.
to make it better, you may consider optimising the images.
the first image Nitro Buggy is of 36kb though it is small in dimensions. most of the images are around that file size.
i think you can optimise them further faster loading of your site.
in 800x600 screen, the top banner occupied almost 3/4 space. better reduce the height of it.

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Thanks for the suggestions.

We changed the layout of the page; it looks a lot different now.

www.rctoyhouse.com

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I don't mean to sound negative, and this is an improvement in look and feel, but it still gives an unprofessional feel and look.

The images do not blend into the back ground, some links within the site don't work, and the text on the homepage is a bit hard to read.

Work on blending the background and the images in color and that will give it a cleaner look. Perhaps changing the background color to white will help a little with the layout look and feel.

The site is more organized now, but there are some errors on the page still with the Javascript menus and you haven't pushed this look across the entire site.

Again, if you are serious, you might want to look into hiring a professional to help you get the look and feel up to code.

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Thanks for the comments, greatly appreciate it.

We do plan to look for professionals once we get things settle down.

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After one whole month of working on it, we worked on the overall layout, added a sitemap, changed the logo, did a lot of optimization.

Focused on 3-4 keywords, optimized the title, content, and now working on meta tags for each page.

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Good job. But still needs a lot more work. Would be a good idea to reduce the number of fonts used over the site. Make sure that all pages have the same look.

I do agree with this though!

Maybe when you have the funds!

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My Nook | My Biz | My Photos

My original offer still stands.

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We offer a total eCommerce solution with eCommerce Web Design using Pinnacle Cart

I agree with the various other comments on this post. IMHO I think if you have the money it would be worth it to get a pro to design the site. I notice someone made such an offer.

What you are really trying to get your site to look like is:

http://www.amazon.com

They are the benchmark for very good reason.

If you don't have the money, you may consider getting a very pretty looking Shopping Cart SW, such as:

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/

http://www.storefront.net/solutions/...cart_demos.asp

Regards
David Tislini