Please Review Handcrafted Jewellery Website

[haycreations]

Hi Everyone,
I have just recently launched my new Online Boutique Store http://www.haycreations.com.au/ and would love some feedback about the site - appearance, functionality, content etc and also suggestions on how I could attract more people to subscribe to my newsletter.

It seems I've been working so hard on photographing my work and uploading all the images that I've lost my objectivity about the website! So any suggestions on how I could further improve it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Melanie Hay
Jewellery Artist
Online Boutique:http://www.haycreations.com.au/
Blog: http://haycreations.com.au/blog/

[MoneyMagnets]

Hi Melanie,

Just to let you know that the link is incorrect for your website and also in the link for online boutique (too many http's in the link).

Regards,
Karen

[haycreations]

Ooops........Thanks Karen!

Didn't even notice all the extra letters. I guess it makes it hard for people to look at the site when you give them the incorrect address!

Regards

Melanie

[NetOrigin]

Under the categories menu, maybe make the menu links black so it stands out. Easy and visible site navigation is important for your visitors.

[TheTrish]

Hi Melanie,

Just a few things regarding Accessibility.

Times roman is really hard to read if it is small, let alone if it is in Italics, try to keep your font consitent either choose all Times Roman or All Arial, try not to have some headings in Arial and some in Times roman

Maybe make the body text about 2x larger or change it to Arial to make it easy to read. Remember you have about 2 seconds to grab your users attention so anything they dislike they will immediately leave, that also means anything different or difficult.

Maybe make the navigation into buttons by putting a Grey, black or dotted line around each link giving them some more space, so they look more like navigation buttons than floating text.

Also maybe give the "page" a border to contain the area. It looks a bit like it is floating in mid air and this might loose structure for some visual people.

There is a big white space in the very top left hand site of the "page". this is the most important realestate as the user always looks from the top left of the page down to the bottom right and therefore your most important elements should be top left, left, middle, then right so the page flows.

I would also try and add some more colour to the site it looks a bit sparse but you don't want to clutter it up either. The colour from the logo would be great to implement.

I hope this helps.

regards
trish

[relentless]

I have to agree about the font-size it needs to be larger.

As for the newsletter you'll have to be a bit more creative for the heading 'subsribe to our newsletter' won't get you many sign ups. Think about what your target audience would be interest in, and create a heading out of that. 'Discover how to match your jewellery with your clothes' I don't know really that's just an example, even shorter than that would be better.

Create a few different headings and test which ones get more signups, then you can slowly make a decision on which one gets you the most signups.

Also for your blog try to create entertaining/interesting blog posts and when people comment you will have their email address too

[haycreations]

Thanks relentless, Trish & Slunkur for the contructive and very helpful feedback about my site. I will certainly take your comments and suggestions into consideration as I work on further developing the site.

The font size issue was quite an eye opener because on my 17" laptop and 18" second screen the font size appeared quite big enough. So out of curiosity I checked to see what it looked like on my husbands 21" wide screen desktop computer, and sure enough as you folks pointed out, the font looks tiny. Problem is, when I changed it to the larger font, it now looks oversized on my laptop and 2nd screen but correct on my husbands - so any suggestions about how to address this discrepancy would be great because I imagine looking at oversized font would be just as annoying to people as viewing undersized?!

Also, Trish, you mentioned that your screen is showing New times Roman Font whereas my screen and the website default font is Century Gothic - any ideas on how to fix this?!

Relentless, just to clarify: are you saying my blog posts are not interesting at the moment? If so, what sort of content would you be interested in reading about on a jewellery artist blog?

Anyhow, really appreciate your time & comments everyone!

Regards

Melanie

[Heidi Price]

Problem is, when I changed it to the larger font, it now looks oversized on my laptop and 2nd screen but correct on my husbands - so any suggestions about how to address this discrepancy would be great because I imagine looking at oversized font would be just as annoying to people as viewing undersized?!

Surprisingly, the daggy old bulky CRT monitors ARE still the standard due to the number of them still out there. I would suggest setting your screen resolution to 1024 x 768 (approx 960pixels by 720 pixels). This will let you see the site as the majority of monitors will display it.

Also, Trish, you mentioned that your screen is showing New times Roman Font whereas my screen and the website default font is Century Gothic - any ideas on how to fix this?!

If you have not set the font style and size in your HTML or CSS, the browser will set it's own default, based on the fonts installed at "c:\windows\fonts\" on the visitors computer. Therefore, you need to set the font-family, although be aware that if the visitor's computer does not have that font, it will still display their default one - but by setting the family and not just the font you have the best chance possible of controlling it.

Hope that helps a bit Melanie


Heidi

[relentless]

sorry I didn't mean to imply that your current blog posts are not interesting, I didn't read them. You can also try social bookmark your blog posts to get more traffic to them