I am the owner and designer of an on-line retail jewelry company. The site has been up for a couple years now and overall has had some great success. I am really starting to get into the S.E.O aspect and trying to add some more advanced features to the site to bring it to the next level. I've never really reached out and asked for direct feedback on the site overall.

Currently, I would love any type of feedback on color scheme, layout, overall design, how easy it is to navigate through, product search feature, professional appeal, and other constructive feedback.

I am new to this forum and so far I am really impressed with the resources available here.

Thank you in advance for your time.

www.theicechest.com
www.kbjewelers.net


Kevin Boilard
K.B. Jewelers

1.
Non-Secure pages when using checkout for secure.bizsiteservice.com
It is because there are non-https urls being used in the page.
http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/kbjewelers1/TheIceChest-ff.swf
http://images.scanalert.com/meter/www.kbjewelers.net/13.gif


The page to fill in billing/account information wasn't secure
The page to choose your shipping method and the way you want to pay wasn't secure
The page for entering Credit Card information was secure(thank goodness)


2. Duplicate Content
Both of these are the same and may land you into a duplicate content problem down the road
secure.bizsiteservice.com
kbjewelers.net

3. Keep home the same everywhere:
Your "Home" link is currently http://www.kbjewelers.net/the_ice_chest and should be just http://www.kbjewelers.net
Having it the way it is now will only hurt you rather than help.

Thanks for the feedback. I will be looking at those areas you referenced this weekend. The only thing I was a little confused with was section #2 Duplicate Content. Can you elaborate a little more on that for me? I'm not 100% sure of how I would correct that issue. Thanks again!


kb

Check out this page here:

The Ice Chest - Benjamin & Co. Collection White Gold Diamond Tennis Bracelets, Pendant, Necklace

The Benjamin & Co. logo looks like you're either using a low res picture or you're putting a smaller picture into a larger picture box, so it is getting stretched to fit the larger box.

Anything that you can do to improve the quality of the pictures themselves will help your conversion rate here. Your website is screaming for a zoom function to get a real closeup of your beautiful products.

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kbjewelers,

Scratch #2
A mistake on my part.
I noticed that after revisiting secure.bizsiteservice.com and my session had expired that I was unable to view it as I did before. There won't be a problem since you can't directly go to secure.bizsiteservice.com without already have visited the main site.

Google Junky

Thanks for the clarification and the rest of your feedback.


kb

First of all, my FF browser doesn’t allow flash, so the header was not displayed for me. Animated gifs can be used as an alternative and can look just as good ensuring that everyone gets the full effect of your presentation right off the bat. It is somewhat distracting and annoying to have to allow the flash. Normally I don't allow it on an unfamilar site. Also the header is not lining up with the rest of the page in either FireFox or Explorer, it is slightly shorter.

You can check your code at this link. The W3C Markup Validation Service

My Explorer browser did show the flash and to my surprise there are two animations! In my opinion there is too much animation going on up above the fold. Consider moving the second one down, perhaps resized to fit the empty space where the products are displayed.

I went to the …/products page and thought it could be laid out better. With the Featured Products lined up on the right side it leaves too much empty space on the left. It may balance the page to put the product directory in the left column and let the featured products display two in a row to shorten that section.

FAQ #2… How Long will it take for me order to ship? The word ‘me’ should be ’my’… my order to ship.

I didn’t have time to look at any more of the pages but I am guessing that they all have the same text centered and floating at the bottom. There has to be a better way to incorporate this text so that it looks better and part of the page.

Keep working it, you have done a pretty nice job so far!
.

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Thank you very much for taking the time to post your feedback. I have heard others mention they can not view the flash header and it is probably time to get that removed.

The header not being aligned came into play when I added the Flash header. I believe removing the flash header will correct this problem, but will keep an eye on it after the header has been changed.

I'm really not a big fan of the Featured Product page and need to get that changed or removed.

I will take a look at improving the layout of the text at the bottom.

Thank you again!!

Kevin

Here are a few things in the order as I saw them.

1. When I click on your logo it does not do anything. Visitors assume that clicking the logo will take them to the main page.
2. Your title should be 66 characters or less including spaces. After 60 characters, Google will cut off the title when it's displayed in the SERP's.
3. You have way too many keywords. Try to cut them down to around 8-10.
4. I did not see the use of header tags. I would add these.
5. Alt text is missing on images.
6. I would add titles to your text links.
7. Your top header is not as wide as the content that is under it. This is due to your cart. Once you add a product to your cart it makes the top header even smaller.
8. I would change f_a_q_1 to FAQ but this is very minor.
9. You have a canonicalization issue that needs addressing.
10. On your about us page these two images did not show.
/images/1-bottomlogo.gif
/images/1-bottomlogo2.gif
11. On your contact us page this image did not show /img/think.gif
Question why are you pulling your images from a few different sites? Your site can only be as fast as the slowest you pull from.
12. None of the images on "diamond_grading_chart" loaded.
13. Why is your "shop by product" only on the main page? I would add this to every page.
14. On your main page, on the left you have a link to journeywithdiamonds.com that opens in the same window taking people from your page. This link also adds confusion as to now I'm not sure who you are. Are these companies one and the same?

Overall I liked the site and colors. Seeing you pull your images from many different sites and also linking to other sites from product images is not helping in building credibility.

I also thought that you text on the main page was one size too small when viewed in a higher resolution.

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The Sensual Touch Lingerie | High Heels | High Heel Blog

Hi,

I like the design of your site. But you should define a standard domain, your site is available with www and without. You have put too many keywords in the keyword-tag, Google might punish that (keyword stuffing).

Don't write your meta-tags in capital letters.

Cheers

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Please read the Forum Rules about signature links.

You look about ready to start learning about visual merchandising design. That's A/B split runs and planograms, and testing different things.

At this point do a runthrough of searching for a particular item, comparisons between products, and all the way to checkout for usability problems to fix. (don't expect a casual look-see to reveal these problems)

You're getting casual comments from people who aren't buying the product or using the site the way a user would.

Testing may reveal surprises, like users want to know what you're selling -- not generic categories with pics. They want featured items where featured items go: On the Top Page.

Finally you might want to look into business identity design, and no business identity in the customer's mind is not the logo. From my own casual look I couldn't spot much different from any of 5,000 other jewelry sites -- right down to what makes you bridal jewelry specialists. Sounds like a tagline you added because you're supposed to have one, not any kind of unique business proposition or theme.

A theme would be like if you offered a "If she dumps you with 90 days, get a full refund on your wedding band." Some slight indication you know and support the context these purchases have in the lives of customers. It's not a vending machine for diamond rings, even though you have it set up that way.

Related:

Visual Merchandising And Web Site Catalog Copy And yes, you could do with well written copy. You're not just selling a commodity weight of gold with a commodity stone plunked in it -- you're selling romance for the hand.

Check out Amazon's UI for diamond selection -- the company understands how people figure out how much diamond they can afford. Most sites aren't geared to support or foster shopping behavior, the design only supports the purchase transaction at the end. This is the vending machine model of visual merchandising, and very bad for emotion driven big ticket purchases like jewelry.

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