Almost done website...tell me what you think!

[kyme1911]

Love it....very friendly,great colors and down to earth about me page!I like to read those pages on sites that I visit too.

Kyme

[JimJuris]

I critique websites professionally. I have critiqued over 600 websites in the last 5 years or so.

Here is my critique of your home page.

Your home page loads very fast on my dial-up connection.

You have great art work and photographs.

I recommend that you use keywords in your title. Your present title is- The Palm Beach Candle Company. The more keywords that you have in your title the better your website will rank in the search entines. Use all 70 characters in your title, which includes punctuation and spaces. If you go over 70 characters by a few characters that is fine.

I would recommend using alt tags that describe the item in the photograph, not - Welcome to the Palm Beach Candle Company. Use different alt tags for each photograph.

Where is your telephone number? You should have your telephone number on your home page so that people can call you to ask you questions about your products and place orders.

What is WAHM? It took me a while to figure it out. Maybe other people won't know that WHAM means work at home moms.

If you want your website to rank high in the search engines you will need to have more KEYWORDS on your home page. The first and last 50 to 100 words on a page are the most important to the search engines. Our website is currently under construction and Thanks for shopping with us will not help your search engine rankings.

What is your USP? UPS= Unique Selling Proposition. Why should someone do business with you as opposed to some other website. You don't give any reason why your website visitors should do business with you on your home page. You are in a competitive business so you have to let your visitors know why they should be doing business with you and not someone else.

What is your return and refund policy? I don't see anything about that on your home page. I would recommend having a page for that on your website.

That is about it for your home page.

Feel free to ask me any questions about my critique.

Edited December 9, 2009 by JimJuris

[lsbennis]

@JimJ....thanks for the critique, all very valid points, a few of which I have not even thought of. Well like I said in my initial post a web designer and SEO person is worth their weight in gold and someday I will hire one...lol I do however still have alot of work to do on the site and I will definilty add those pointers on the to do list...lol thanks again for you comments. :smiley2:

[JimJuris]

I think that you are off to a good start. You are doing a lot better than I did when I created my first website.

I have been selling online since September 2002, except for maybe a year or so during that time period.

You can have the greatest website in the world but if nobody can find it it doesn't do you any good. That is why it is important to have your website optimized for the search engines.

You also need to convince your visitors to stay on your website once they arrive at your site. It is very easy for visitors to go from one website to another. That is why you need a USP.

I forgot to mention in my critique of your home page that you shouldd also include your email address on the home page so that people don't have to search for it if they want to contact you.

The more clicks a visitor has to make to find something or order something the more likely they are to leave your website.

You may want to reduce the size of your images and/or graphics in order to fit more information on your home page.

Another think that I thought of after I did my critique was that navigation is usually LEFT ALIGNED not centered. Your navigation looks like a Christmas Tree. Go to any website and you will see what I mean.

Speaking of navigation, maybe you could make the horizontal navigation a little bit larger or use black lettering. Probably black lettering would be better. You have a white on a light colored background. Black lettering would give more contrast and make it easier to see and read. If you don't want to use black lettering a darker color would be fine.

I don't know if you have statistics on your website, but you may want to consider adding statistics so that you can see how many visitors are visiting your website, what pages they have visited, what search term they used to arrive at your website, etc.

I recommend using Statcounter.com. Statcounter is FREE and it is invisible to your website visitors.

I also use Google Analytics, but I like Statcounter just as much or more then Google Analytics.

Both are free and invisible to your website visitors.

Good luck with your website design.