'Bear With Us' Site Review

[Head Bear]

Help, Maybe.

Our website, www.BearWithUs.us has been active for almost 2 years with no sales. I just switched to a new host and a web designer I know, talked me into using his hosting and e-commerce.

Please review the whole website..Is it eye catching, easy to use and navigate? Is it slow loading? Main items critics would look for..Only inputs I have had so far is from my wife and sister-in-law.

Is the site search engine friendly?

Any and All input is appreciated..

Thank You,
Head Bear

PS: We sell Bears. Boyds and Bearingtons

[MarcieZoob]

I get more of an amateur feel to this site than one of a professional entity that is selling online. I would recommend that you develop a warmer look for your site design - I don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling from this site. Right now it looks very pieced together, with more hi-tech components than "warm, fuzzy" design elements.

There are too many font styles in varying sizes throughout your site (the majority of the type is too big, especially on the product pages).

In the footer, the web developer credit is blowing your table out. When you view a product, the orange area on the right is kind of weird. There's just no balance to those pages.

To me, the most important thing to address is the design and look - find something warmer and more inviting.

[hs4u]

I agree with the above. Your site needs more photos of the bears with curves, not the harsh square lines on this site. And your text is centered? I don't like that.

The banner at the top moves too much. It is very fast and distracting. You need more of a playful, warm feel, not the high-tech it looks like you are trying for. Not a fan of the tabs either.

I think a smoother feel would benefit your site. I like product pictures. That is what you want folks to buy, right? Show more on the front rather than the graphics on the side. Also, bigger pictures of the bears inside the main text would look nice. How about a featured bear with details? The graphics on the side could be smaller and at the bottom. Your site links are hidden on the side below these graphics.

Also, if you want to put up something for your designer, it should be small and unobtrusive. This is an online ad for your site, not theirs.

As far as underlining text, if you underline links, don't underline text. It confuses the reader. Your links lose validity if you can't tell the diffence. You could make the links in the text a different color. Or just bold the text that is underlined. Keep it simple. Not too distracting.

I hope I am not sounding too harsh. I like the bears, they are cute. I wish you luck in selling them.

[ADAM Web Design]

Forgive me, Head Bear, but I've got half a hunch that the reason you want this site reviewed on here is because you have doubts about the overall quality and potential for success as far as what you're getting. If that's the case, I'm sure you've pretty well realized that they're very well-justified suspicions on your part.

I'm also making the assumption that you're not a web designer, because someone else's logo is on the site and because you've mentioned that you hired someone you know. This means that I have no idea of your level of knowledge, so I'm going to play it safe and explain everything as thoroughly as I can. Please don't take this as an insult to your intelligence; that's not the intention.

Normally, I would never make this recommendation, but in this case it actually serves to illustrate one of the biggest problems with your site.

Before you go to bed one night (or when you're really tired one day), open up the home page of your site. The effect all of the animation has on your eyeballs will show you what a lot of other people will see when they look at your site. There's simply too much motion, used in such a way as to draw attention away from where it's supposed to be.

As far as your designer's ad goes, I've never supported anyone's logic except for MarcieZoob's as far as why an ad should be there. You paid them to do work, and unless their status as a designer will enhance your reputation in the community (which is highly unlikely), then put the kibosh on the design link.

You will get punished by search engines that don't recognize querystrings. Querystrings are the part from the ? on in each URL of your site, and are used to present varying content (this way, only one page would need to be created to display 200 or so, since dynamic content changes.)

So, for the search engines that ignore your querystrings, most of your URLs are going to appear as http://www.bearwithus.us/index.cfm , and that's all they'll see.

You've got a typo in your meta keywords tag on your home page. It says "Bearinton" instead of "Bearington". The meta keywords tag is a piece of HTML code that some search engines look at when they're looking for the keywords and phrase a page should be found under (although marginally used at best, so it's not an overly big deal).

Speaking of your code, there is an inordinate amount of white space in it (usually the sign of an automatic code editor such as FrontPage). This will hurt you both in terms of load time and search-engine friendliness, since your code is longer and harder to read.

As far as being ready for search engines goes, your site isn't. Besides the querystring issue mentioned earlier, you've got issues involving the various HTML tags that the engines access.

The title tags (this is the tag that generates the title of a page for the search engine and for the web browser) contain your company name and not much else;

your meta description tag (this is the tage that generates the description of a page that some search engines e.g. Google use) contain very little actual description and in many cases are left blank. (As in the content of the description tag is nothing at all.)

If your site is VeriSign-secured and you paid for the SSL (Secure Socket Layer--this is the part that encrypts sensitive data, such as credit card data, so that it can be processed securely), you overpaid bigtime. I don't blame you for this in any way, shape or form: VeriSign/Network Solutions is the longest-serving company for both domain names and SSLs. However, the good folks at www.instantssl.com can hook you up with your SSL starting at $49 USD/year.

I'm Canadian myself, so I'm not overly familiar with the players in this industry and what might be the best solution for you. However, there are a few members on here such as Corey Bryant and Steven Allen who really know their stuff and would probably be able to give you the correct guidance (I can try, but not being American, I'm not likely to be of that much use to you.)

Deleting a product is confusing, since there's no way to tell what to click on after the check box to update the cart. A simple "update cart" button would suffice that way, in order to allow quantity updates, etc.

The cart page generated an error for me after I added something to the cart:

Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = 42000 (Syntax error or access violation)


[TCX][MyODBC]You have an error in your SQL syntax near '' at line 1


SQL = "select name, imagesmall, imagebig from products where productid ="

Data Source = "FOLDER12352"


The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFQUERY), occupying document position (325:9) to (325:56) in the template file D:\CCV5\SYSTEM\SITE_CODE\CART\DSP_CART.CFM.


Date/Time: 12/04/05 00:25:55
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
Remote Address: 72.141.1.243
HTTP Referer: http://www.bearwithus.us/index.cfm?f...1215&pageid=37
Query String: fuseaction=cart&cartaction=add&id=1215&product=5&q ty=1&tid=3852

And at this point, I'm incredibly confused. You have a "Verisign Secure Site" logo on the home page of your site, but now when I reach the checkout page I'm being told you use PayPal?

And to make matters even more confusing, the checkout page does actually indicate that you're using an SSL. I see an https:// in the URL and a lock on the bottom (Internet Explorer's sign of a secure site.)

I also don't know if some fields are required and some aren't on this form. All fields should be clearly labelled as required/not required.

Which leads me to my next problem. I'm Canadian, so I'm not from a US state. But the form doesn't seem to like that. It unilaterally cleared out my home province of "Ontario" as well as my company name, the checkbox for my shipping information and billing information being the same, and my special instructions.

I'm also pretty sure that, as an international customer, you couldn't ship a bear to me for $5.00 via UPS. You should look into having your costs calculated as well.

And now the part I really hate to say, but it's what I believe and if I don't tell you what I feel, I'm doing you a disservice.

To fix the problems that I discovered on the surface would cost you far too much and take far too long to fix, simply because my discovering these problems means there are many others.

You need to rebuild your site from the ground up, and hire a web designer/developer who knows what he/she is doing to help you. This is in no way a solicitation of service (I'm booked solid right through Christmas and into January), but there are quire a few people on this board that, if you made the request, could help you.

Put a post in the Freelance Work Needed/For Hire board. Someone's bound to be able to help you.

[Tim]

Is it eye catching? No
Is it easy to use and navigate? It's OK
Is it slow loading? Quite @ 28.8K = 26.63secs @56K = 13.70secs
Is the site search engine friendly? NO!

The index page has 242 errors.
The 'Small Bears' page has 468 errors.
The 'Medium Bears' page has 480 errors.
The 'Large Bears' page has 287 errors, I won't go on.

Every page fails the accessibility check at http://www.contentquality.com in a big way.

You should have used CSS to replace <font> and most <table> tags in order to make your site future-proof and quicker.

If you have no training and this is your first site, you should be congratulated on producing quite a complex site that works and looks more or less the same in several browsers. Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be enough for the site to achieve optimal potential. I took a quick look at other teddy bear sites and wasn't impressed with any of them. It would appear that this niche market is ready and waiting for a professionally made site to dominate for a while.

Good luck.

[Head Bear]

The replies I have received so far is what I expected.

At first, I built my own website and was only using PayPal..This editor I was using, I had to paste the HTML from paypal and that got to be a hassle.

I read an article in our local paper about MDVWebCreations and thought, "Hey, it's a local guy, I'll give it a try" I was in a rush and didn't really check this guy out.

Some past problems he could fix. Others he just told me somethings were inherent in the program. I decided to run several website tests and did not like the results. Thus, I found this forum and hoped someone will tell me what I have suspected.

As I write this my wife and I have already reserched another webdesigner and we are now rebuilding our site.

My Thanks to all who had to endure my present site. Real soon I may ask for assistance again.

Thank You,
Head Bear

[Tim]

I feel for you Head Bear and Mrs Bear,

You've been stitched up (pardon the pun)!

I'm glad you have another designer working on the job and I hope it's not too late to make the following stipulations for the resulting site.

The site should;

• Only use validated HTML and CSS
  Be accessible and friendly to all users
  Work effectively in all browsers
  Be search engine friendly, with relevant meta tags and sensible use of H1 (H2, H3) and [b]
  Have a coherent, pleasant and 'positive' design
  Have a Privacy Policy

These are the 'bear' essentials for any site but it's useful to see them listed. You should also insist that you see the site as it's being built. Ask the designer to upload significant changes on a regular basis to a non-public web space so that you can approve or request alterations. Get Firefox, Netscape and Opera on your system and check the site with those. Add the 'Web Developer' extension to Firefox and use it's tools to check your pages as they grow. If you spot a problem, tell the designer straight away.

[ran_dizolph]

Just out of curiosity...did anyone check out the MDVwebcreations site? WOW. it broke the validator.

[ADAM Web Design]

Head Bear,

You're welcome. But enduring bad sites is part of what we do here. It's how good sites emerge...you need something ugly to compare to something beautiful.

Anyway...keep us posted as you go along with your new designer. That way, (s)he doesn't get too far with things and you're not stuck with something that won't work for you.