Brand new website for review ~ tagline.com.au

[Leisa D]

Hi all, I've been busy over the last couple of days putting together a new website / online store and would love any feedback.

tagline.com.au

What needs reviewing:

- Overall look

- Navigation

- User friendli-ness

- Products offered

- Text content

- SEO

Note: Some pages are still being built.

Anything at all you'd like to comment on, as it's great to get outside opinions when working so closely on a project.

Thanks in advance,

Leisa

[nitro-it]

I'll offer some constructive criticism (pls take it that way).

Overall Look - Not that pleasing on the eye. Doesn't look very modern. I don't think 100% width is the best idea. I'm using a 22" screen and reading the first few lines is like watching a game of tennis. Being presented with Order fields prior to seeing a Description of what I'm meant to be ordering seems backward. This area is probably too spaced out, if possible put the description on the left and the order fields on the right to compact each product area a bit. Not enough emphasis on your examples either, they're very small compared to the rest of the components on the site.

Navigation - Confusing. I'm not sure I get it. Perhaps the Home page could be used to sell yourself, give people reasons to buy from you before trying to get them to buy for the hell of it, i.e. use some of the content from About and some testimonials etc on the home page rather than the Popular items.

The only other thing I'd comment on is the fact that there are product examples showing a Zoom icon, yet the larger version is not any bigger at all. Pet peeve of mine!

I'll leave the rest up to someone else. Hope I've helped in some way.

[MatthewKeath]

Hi,

I have to agree with Mr Nitro it.

100% width is a big no no when it comes to website design.

It's a confusing site, nothing is where you would expect it to be. The structure is vital, especially as it's a eCommerce site.

Cheers,

Matt

[SAmedia]

Like the other designers have mentioned, structure and navigation are some of the most important elements to your site.

If your business is primarily going to generate sales from your website, I would seriously consider investing in a professional web designer to create a proper eCommerce website. You may be getting a free or low cost site at the moment, but the time used in upgrading and maintaing it will add up in the long term.

A professional web designer should be able to deliver you a proper eCommerce solution with inventory management, smooth sales flow and customer relationship management.

Food for thought I guess.

All the best,
Sean

[Leisa D]

Thanks for the comments, I've changed to a template with fixed width - hopefully this and some overall tweaking / reorganising will get it there. I'm using shopfactory with integrated e-commerce by the way, it's very seo friendly and has lots of features, but the design side is a bit limiting.

[MatthewKeath]

Originally Posted by leisadent

Thanks for the comments, I've changed to a template with fixed width - hopefully this and some overall tweaking / reorganising will get it there. I'm using shopfactory with integrated e-commerce by the way, it's very seo friendly and has lots of features, but the design side is a bit limiting.

Looks much better

[Bob Jones]

You might want to sort out your robots.txt - it's currently preventing pages to get indexed. For example: the second page in your navbar (Swing Tags). If you enter that URL into Google, you won't find it.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=e...wing_tags.html

I suggest you take out the following lines:
Disallow: */contents/
Allow: */contents/*/*

After that, redo your sitemap and resubmit in Google Webmaster Tools to get it indexed.

[Leisa D]

Originally Posted by Bob Jones

You might want to sort out your robots.txt - it's currently preventing pages to get indexed. For example: the second page in your navbar (Swing Tags). If you enter that URL into Google, you won't find it.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=e...wing_tags.html

I suggest you take out the following lines:
Disallow: */contents/
Allow: */contents/*/*

After that, redo your sitemap and resubmit in Google Webmaster Tools to get it indexed.

Thanks Bob, if I knew how do to any of that I would, but I know zero about programming - I use shopfactory, which basically does everything for me - I only add content, meta info, etc. but it does have its limits.

Thanks for the reminder about sitemap though, I need to add that to webmaster tools.

[Bob Jones]

Originally Posted by leisadent

Thanks Bob, if I knew how do to any of that I would, but I know zero about programming - I use shopfactory, which basically does everything for me - I only add content, meta info, etc. but it does have its limits.

Thanks for the reminder about sitemap though, I need to add that to webmaster tools.

You don't need programming skills. Simply get into your hosting account, find the robots.txt file, and edit it with notepad by removing the two lines I suggested.

They're keeping your sites pages from appearing in Google, which I assume isn't what you want

[MatthewKeath]

Originally Posted by Bob Jones

You might want to sort out your robots.txt - it's currently preventing pages to get indexed. For example: the second page in your navbar (Swing Tags). If you enter that URL into Google, you won't find it.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=e...wing_tags.html

I can see that page has been indexed, along with the other pages from the sub dir: http://www.tagline.com.au/contents/

The robots files only seems to be blocking certain pages, not the enire contents dir.