Hi All,
I really need you guys' profesional advices! I am recently working on this ecommerce website and strugling to improve it! I have submitted it to check with SiteReportCard and it is true that the web loading score is 1/10
My biggest problem is the slow loading, I think it is around 9 seconds but the report said 216 secs!!!! Anyway, I have tried the flash optimizer, image compression...etc, oddly, I think for some reason the website loading is ...worse!!! I don't get it at all!!

So please help and give some advices as I know you guys are real web pro (not like me! )
Thanks in advance.
vthexpress

In your logo area, the VTH Express with the (eagle/hawk/bird of prey) has a tagline that reads 'Online Trading with Confidence' - this tagline is too small and the rest of that element could be a lot crisper. The header of the logo (the main logo) is inset in a shaded black oval which becomes fainter as you approach the edges of the oval. The entire logo element, I would send out to have somebody give you some options (I am not an artist, but to me this logo is simply lacking something).

You have a pull down menu offering different languages, but, for instance if you choose 'Albanian' it throws the site through google's machine translator. After you get enough stats to evaluate, try to find out how many people are using it, because I am INCLINED to say that particular element should be deleted.

You also have 'black' / 'grey' / 'green' / 'blue' which if you click on it, the background changes color. Neat in principle, but frankly takes away from the focus of your site. I would be inclined to delete that element. If somebody dislikes the background enough that they leave the site, I doubt they're even going to notice that. Overall, your default color scheme, yellow on top of black, I personally do not care for. I clicked on the 'green' and I think the 'green' looks much nicer and should probably be your default, but consider your color selections carefully, it could make all the difference. Color preferences are so inherently subjective, its really difficult to comment on.

The Live Chat Feature - I like live chat, I utilize it when I shop online but I do not put them on my websites because I don't want to be chained to the computer. The one thing I dislike about 'live chat' is when 'live chat' isn't an option and the screen says 'offline' please leave a message. I would recommend offering live chat, or if the service is temporarily disconnected to show nothing at all (but that is frankly a personal preference)

On your homepage when I was looking you show the 'Shure SE210-Sound Isolating' which if you mouse over, the computer will attempt to show a 'zoom' pop up window. I like zooming features, but you have the zoom feature 'too shallow' in the website (particularly on the home page). For instance, if your basic structure is:
A. Home Page
B. Category Page
C. Product Page

You should permit zooming on the 'C' product page. If you do it on A & B, I find the feature annoying and distracting. On the actual product page, you do not permit 'mouseover' zooming, but defer to 'click' and then a larger image pops up.

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SiteReportCard is misleading for most of us. The report is estimated for 28Kb connection speeds, and, 216 seconds could well be correct for your site on such a slow link.

For the US-oriented corporate employment sites I build and maintain dialup users (56Kb connections) average less than 8.0% of all site visits. More significantly, they are not the demographic my clients seek to attract. Their logic is that a US resident who is not yet using broadband is not a prospect for employment.

This may not be true for sites in other countries, or even for US sites with different demographic needs yet it points out the question for you: do you want or need your site to appeal to dialup users?

If you don't need dialup users your site is plenty fast enough, I've tried it.

Dennis

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Final Expense Insurance | Mortgage Protection Leads | Frisco Chiropractor

For me the page loaded fine with IE8 and Safari but Firefox version 3.0.11 locked up on me 4 times trying to load the page to the point I had to force it to close.

I also created a bogus account and walked though checkout and

PayPal: Not everyone will use PayPal and you would be better off getting a SSL and a real gateway. Also vietlondon@gmail.com does not look professional at all and would make me not proceed with checkout. I also thought that it did not put the correct item into PayPal but when I hit back my cart was empty! You may want to have PayPal open in a new window to help prevent this. Lastly I surfed your site using dollar amounts, but when I went to PayPal, it showed it in pounds.

Google checkout :
Oops!
VTH Express Ltd has sent Google a shopping cart with errors in it. We'll contact them to ask that they fix this problem. As this could be a temporary issue, you can go back in your browser to try checking out again.

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The Sensual Touch Lingerie | High Heels | High Heel Blog

Took a very long time (15+ seconds) to load.
All of a sudden the movie is spinning rapidly.
Contact Us has no postal, phone, physical. And, yes, I know it is in the logo area.
Too much black for me.

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

Hi,
Sorry for slow response, for some reason I could not connect to WPW all morning!
Thanks for all your valuable input, very accurate too!
You are absolutely right! From beginning, the logo and the banner were much better but due to the slow loading, I tried to cut down the swf from 150kb to 40kb! they look bad eh? will relook into this.

Good point! Many of these countries don't have PayPal or PayPal does not approve.
I will research more on this topic.

My wife complained that she could not read my "Terms and Conditions" for long, it hurted her eyes!! (why the heck you read that for? I thought!) That is why the little buttons exist! Umm this is difficult!

Thanks, will look into it.
Vthexpress

Hi Dennis,
Sorry for slow response, I could not connect to WPW all morning!
Thanks for your info about the dial-up connection!
I did not know that and it really bothers me for the last three weeks! It puzzled me and I did my best to cut down all the heavy flash files (banner, carousel) to the minimum now that they look a bit acceptable.

Is there any pro tools out there to check out the reason for slow loading apart from graphics? I heard about webpage compression tools from some where but not sure.

vthexpress.

Hi,
Sorry for slow response, I could not connect to WPW all morning!
Thanks for your pin-point accurate comments.

Yes I am using FF 3.0.11 and have seen this problem sometimes but could not find the reason! Does it happen "all the time" with you?

You are absolutely right, I am using Prestashop 1.1 and these are its weakness currently. With Paypal, if everything correct ( customer has proper Paypal account) then it works fine but maybe it does not cover the bogus account or other senarios!
I will test more on these issues.
Thanks,
vthexpress

Hi Dave,
Sorry for slow response, I could not connect to WPW all morning!
Contact us? Oh, it is a link and when user click it, a webform is presented for user to input! It looks like I could confuse customers on this!

Yes we have to work harder on the web initial loading! 15 secs is not acceptable!
I just hope you guys would advise me something on this.
Thanks Dave for the comments.
vthexpress

A good news is that your wesite content is consistent for Google. I tested it with logyourlink category recommender and it falls into "retail shopping", "online shopping", "sales", etc.

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