I'm looking for some constructive criticism on my website...?

Question

I designed my website myself as I am just starting out. I'd like some direction of easy ways I might add changing content without adding adwords or anything too obviously distracting.

The goal of course it to attract more people to the site, to create brand awareness and of course to generate sales of my jewelry.

As I make mostly one-of-a-kind and custom pieces I find adding photos of items with prices causes too much of my time to be spent updating prices, adding buttons and then removing items once they are sold. Many pieces are often sold before I ever have time to photograph.

Please give me any advice on creating an interesting site people might want to visit again and again.

http://www.silversmyth.com

Thanks so much for your help!

Answer 1

Hey, for your first site this is not all that bad.

Here are a few recommendations:

- Your navigation is a little confusing. I would do some simple tihngs like change Gallery to Home and make the link to home www.silversmyth.com not silversmyth.com/index.html

- Try to move away from using PayPal as quickly as possible. Most internet retailers report a 20% increase in sales after going to tranditional credit card processing.

- Change the background image, on my screen the gradiant looks really stretched.

- The fonts are kind of boring. If I am paying you to create custom jewelry I want to see your creativity all the way through.

- Consider consolidating some of your pages. There is no reason that you couldn't reduce the verbage on your aboutus page and move this to the home page. Also, if you are going to include a store locator do so using Google Maps.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I really like your color scheme of the site it fits well with jewelry. To me the site navigation buttons seem not to fit the feel of the site though. Please note that your (Shop) item images do not show well with the IE7 browser.

All the best to you and your endeavors.

Answer 3

I agree with before mentioned comments.  You site looks amazing for a beginner site.  Your site probably needs animations and strategically placed ads.

Best way to improve your site is to look at your competitor's sites.  You will get many ideas.

regarding photos and prices, NEVER REMOVE THEM.  Leave these pictures as a showcase of what you have done already.  Just place a sign beside a price that says:

"Sold Out"

Somewhere on the page indicate the following:

"Sold Out items will soon be restocked, however, if you are interested in placing an order on a particular item that is sold out at this time, please contuct us to make special arrangement"

Whenever, you can add photos of items you have sold before you were able to put them online, and place the price and say it is sold out.

I hope this will help you.

P.S.

regarding traffic to your site, you may want to look at this resource i use to help my sales:

www.Working4U2Earn.com