Hello, and thanks for reading my post.

As I'm sure you know from me just being here that I'm new at this.
I have done some reading and gone thru the sites that do the scoring and such, (yes, I have some work to do). Not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I do have a few things to fix according to those sites. Load time is the main issue, I guess.
So now I figure while I'm here, I might as well see what humans think.
I'm looking so see what you think of the overall experiance when on my site. I am a Stores On Line site owner and I bought 6 licenses. So far in three months, Grecian style garden planters, Flower pots, Soy bean Candles - Handmade Crafts for the Home and Garden - is what I have published. I have have only one sale (is that bad in my first three months?) so far and I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what the problem is. I get 30 visitors a day so far and can find my self as far up as the first page of Google search on some keywords.
Maybe I'm just in to big a rush and its only because of the weather that people arent buying yet. (being its flower pot site and all) Any way, let me have it please. I'm looking for any input I can get here. And if you just think it's a total mess.... say so please.
Thanks a million!

Michael Helms

Sorry... I tried to put my URL in that post but I guess that was a no no because it changed it to a discription. Anyway, it still takes you there.

Overall, not a bad job, but there are a few things I think you need to address

* I feel that you used too many different font styles and colors in your page. The 'comic sans' font does not come across very professional. I would stick with an arial, times new roman or veranda style font.

* On your index page you could shrink down the image size of your accepted methods of payment. You are not selling credit cards. You could then place more enticing products in the right hand column, and bring them above the fold.

* On your images, try and cut out unnecessary blank space within the image itself. An example of what I am talking about is the 12" Grecian urn. You have about 1/2" of gray above the flowers and you have the pillar that it is sitting on. Both could be taken out of this image. You should also not use a .png file for saving images to the web. Inside of Photoshop, click 'file' then 'save for web'. Select either .jpg, which I recommend, or .gif. Set the quality somewhere around 69-75 and click progressive, then save. Your 'soybean candle' image on your main page, I saved it to my computer and it had a file size of 44.6 KB. Once I saved it as a .jpg through the steps listed above, it had a file size of 7.26 KB. This will help your images load much faster.

* Rather than use images for your navability, I recommend that you use text links. This will help the crawlability of your page.

* Something for you to think about on your email a friend. As it sits right now, you click this button and your default mail client opens with a link to your page already inserted into the body of the email. Your visitor fills out who they want to send it to and hits send. You have zero email addresses to add to your email marketing campaign list. What I would do, if you want to have something like this on your page, is make a title 'send this page to a friend'. Underneath that title, have a text area labeled 'senders name'. Under that, have a text area labeled 'senders email'. This one can be eliminated if you do not want to add it. Underneath this have the friends name, then friends email, with a submit button. The friend would therefore get an email from you stating such and such thought you would like this page and had sent it to you. Now you have 2 names and 2 email addresses that you can add to your email list for any email marketing such as sales or campaigns.

* Get rid of the internal styles and put them in an external style sheet .css file.

* You can remove the meta name = robots, copyright, and rights for they are not going to help you at all.

* In your robots.txt file you may want to add a link to your sitemap.

* Your contact us page is nice and you provide all the information necessary, but you may want to consider adding a form that can be quickly filled out by your visitor, with a submit button, for general questions and concerns.

* Your sitemap.xml is not a valid sitemap and does not list every page on your site. I highly recommend that you make a valid sitemap and submit it to Google and Yahoo. You can use this site to make a sitemap for you. You can also save this map in html format and add it to your site as well if wanted.

* Your large images in your products images are way too big. Also your light box / display box needs to be made to where the background is clean and free of folds. The green tablecloth can still be used as long as one cannot tell that it is a green tablecloth.

* It appears that you have an alignment issue on some of your products pages, not the products themselves but 'farmer Dave's and 'Grecian style planters' both should be centered.

* If you aren't already doing so, submit your site to the search engines and search engine friendly directories. I would also recommend adding your products to Google product search.

* Lastly, you may want to consider adding links to different social bookmarks as this is becoming very popular. It can also result in quick backlinks to your site.

Keep in mind that you have only been online for 3 months and it can take a while for the search engines to crawl, index and include you in their search results. For being in your first 3 months, to be listed on the first page of Google is pretty good.

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The Sensual Touch Lingerie | High Heels | High Heel Blog

Thank you AMXFAN,
I was expecting alot worse than what you found, I'm a bit suprized.
I have a few questions that I hope dont sound too stupid of me.

1- I do have some text links to differant pages on the home page as well as pictures, more text links your saying?

2- What do you meen by my INDEX page?

3- The site map I have now, I just put there last week.... why is it not valid? With my program all I had to do was create a page and click on "add site map". I have submitted it to Google and Yahoo already, Please explain why its not valid.

Can you tell me why when I did the site valaditor yesterday it told me that I have like 53 or so mistakes, so I called my people (SOL) and they told me that "those sites all look for differant things and they score differantly than one another, and that if I have mistakes in my coding that my site would not work correctly? They told me not to worry about it and not to go to those scoring sites because they just cause broblems. I'm not sure what to think now.

Gotta get busy now.
Thanks again!

I was referring to your main navigation links on your main page. The ones that say 'My shopping cart, Product page, Grecian Style planters etc etc'. Right now you have them as images. It would be better to use text links with title tags. With a little css, you make make the links look the same as they do now. It is better to use text due to search engines cannot read images, but they love text. Text also improves on your keyword density and relevancy of your site.

Your index page is the same as your home page / main page as it has to be an index.xxx

To be a valid sitemap for Google it has to be a valid .xml file. It also has to adhere to sitemap protocol 0.9. You can check your sitemap for validation at Google Sitemap Validator. Your site map also should include all pages of your site that you wish to have crawled. To make a sitemap you can use the link I provided in my last post or code it by hand. I know there are other sitemap generators but some of them do not validate and others do not list all the pages and there are others that I have not used so I can not recommend them.

Brass tacks of site validation is
1. If you take the time to design and program a site, you should also take the time and pride to make sure your code validates.
2. Validation helps to ensure your page is displayed correctly in all browsers operating on all platforms.
3. It helps to ensure that the search engines do not have any issues when they crawl your site.

With that said I have never been real big on have a site validate 100% "Google's site does not validate"
But it is a good idea to do it to make sure your site does display properly in all browsers and to make sure search engines do not run into an issues when they crawl your site. If you are going to validate your site, use The W3C Markup Validation Service . They like wrote the book on this and have been deemed an authority figure on this, while other validators do a good job, I personally would only use this one.

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The Sensual Touch Lingerie | High Heels | High Heel Blog