Another New Jewelry Site

[starcad]

Hi all,

I purchased this site pretty much ready to go so I can't take full credit for it.  I've been tweaking it to the way I want for the last month now and would like some feedback.  One of my questions is the location of the Privacy, Shipping, and Conditions of Use links.  I'm thinking of relocating them to the top menu.  Comments and criticism's, Thanks- StarCad

http://www.bestjewelryboutique.com

[Nirm]

IMHO you could organise this site better. You have a lot of real estate at the top where your logo is situated. This could be used to house, either 'show cart' or the 'popular products' or both. This area of the site is 'hot' and you need to maximise its usage to hook your customers. After all you only have a couple of seconds to grab a users attention.

Similarly your Main Menu is above Categories. Perhaps it would be better to publish your main menu horizontally  and move categories up in its place. This would also pull Product Search up.

Its good that you are only 2 clicks away from adding to cart.

Apart from that nice site!

[starcad]

Thanks Nirm for taking a few moment to review the site.  I was basically thinking the same thoughts as you, moving things up. I'll be working on it slowly the rest of the week as Joomla and VM are rather new to me, but I'm picking it up rather fast now.

Have a great day - Guy

[starcad]

Niirm, hope you read this.  I thought about your suggestions all day today and tried to think of ways where I thought the page needed cleaning up.  There was a lot of junk on there that as you say were taking up real estate.  So, When I arrived home tonight it was house cleaning time.  I removed and repositions menu links and moved the Categories to the top.  Got rid of items that were blocking my menus from flowing together and took out a few modules and links that seemed redundant to me.  I did keep the logo as I felt this gave the page its image.

If you would, could you please have another look and let me know what you think.

Thanks - Guy

[Nirm]

I've had a quick look - I will comment later

[RedLight Traitor]

The page is very nice. I only have minor suggestions. The scroller on the right is too fast and too small. It doesn't give people enough time to look. I would suggest increasing the height so people have more time to follow the product so the products don't seem like they're playing "peek-a-boo". You might also want to edit the browse details page so that the category pages aren't so cluttered. Notice how it's hard to distinguish the add-to-cart link from one item to another. You can use my link as an example:
http://shopknowlabel.com/handbags.html

Lastly, I highly recommend you go install sh404sef component so that your links are friendly!

[starcad]

Thanks Johnny for your kind comment very appreciated.  I increased the size of the scroller and it now give the effect of slowing it down like you suggested.  As for the browse>categories>details, I've looked all day to find that page or place in admin where I can adjust the distance but to no avail.  Any suggestions from you as to where I can find that part of the setting would greatly be appreciated.    As for sh404sef, I've been looking at that mod for about a month now and read the bad and the good I will probably install on my local server first and give it a try and if all goes well, upload to the store server.

Again thanks for your comments and fine suggestions. - Guy Fuller

[RedLight Traitor]

Hi Guy,

You don't necessarily edit the distance, you simply add the html code to it so that it creates spacing. It's very easy to do, let me know if you still can't figure it out.

sh404sef ROCKS! Don't listen to the newbies that don't know how to set things up and then blame the component. It is highly configurable and will do wonders in terms of making your site appear friendly as well as SEO ranking improvements. I will recommend that you use the mod_rewrite with HTACCESS option (which is the default).

[starcad]

Thanks Johnny, I will download and install this weekend on the local machine and then to the server when I get it configured. 

Just some more Joomla and VM to learn my way around with.  Joomla and VM sure are a lot easier to learn than OSC.

Oh, BTW I got the spacing finally setup, figured out that it is using browse_3 instead of _1 as indicated in the admin.

Thanks again and if I have any questions I'll send you off an IM.

Guy

[starcad]

Update, Johnny, I got sh404sef up and running just had to do  a little fine tuning and turn off the cacshind and it seems to be working just fine.  Also, seems to have raised my page ranking quite a bit in the last several days. 

Thanks again for helping me decide to install sh404sef.

Guy