Small Business Design Resources

Website Critique: Elegant jewelry and crafts

Lorraine Davis, a jewelry and crafts designer has decided to start her own business and set up www.elegantjewelryandcrafts.com website to sell her designs. Designing jewelry and designing websites is a totally different art, below is a video website critique with suggestions on how to improve her website.

In business, first impressions can make or break a sale, a connection, or even an opportunity. Websites are impressions of our business when we’re not there in person. Below are some further explanations and examples from the website critique video on how to make this website more professional and elegant as the name says.

Overall Improvements

www.displayimporter.com

• Set a style for your business and apply it everywhere. Let a professional design your business logo and include it on all your pages. Keep a unified look and color scheme that appeals to your target audience.

• Double-check, triple-check your links to make sure they are working and going where you intended them to go.

• Take professional photos of your products. If you don’t show your products as their best, how can you expect people to see their quality. Buy some jewelry stands and take photos against a white background, your images will look clean, unified and professional.

Homepage

• The homepage needs to have a call-to-action that prompts the visitor to do something: sign up for a newsletter, view gallery or anything else that you expect them to do. If you don’t tell them to act, they won’t.

• Remove 90% of the body text and replace with relevant information that the visitor wants to see.

Order Here page

• There’s no point to have a separate Order Here page. You need to combine your Jewelry page and Order Here page. When people browse your inventory, they want to know how much each item is and it’s information, they shouldn’t have to look for this information on a separate page. You can have a link from your gallery page that goes directly to individual product when clicked for more information.

Other recommendation

You might consider to sell your items on www.artfire.com, it’s a website where people buy and sell handmade products.

More website critiques

Of course there are more things to dive deeply into making this site better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re viewing this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.

Website Critique: Get paid to advertise on your car

The owner of www.cashURwheels.com created this website to be a marketplace where advertisers and business owners can connect with vehicle owners to display the ads on private vehicles. Below is a video website critique suggesting changes to make the website more user friendly for it’s target market.

Having a website that is organized well and that is geared towards it’s target market is what’s going to make a positive impact on the website users.  Below are some further explanations and examples of suggestions that I provide in the website critique video:

Homepage

• The homepage needs to explain to the user right away what the website is about in the most clear and concise form not necessarily in a paragraph form. Keep the homepage simple and to the point.

• Create prominent call-to-actions for your users so each user can clearly associate themselves with one of the categories that are on the website.

For example the image shown below from TradeorSwitch.com (future website) demonstrates the two types of categories that will be on their site: people to people and business to business.

• How this works or some sort of demo needs to be added to the homepage. This is a relatively new concept and users will want to know how it works, so give them what they want.

• Add a gallery section to the navigation or the sidebar.

Inner pages

• Move the ads to the side of the website to create more room for your content like you have on the homepage.

• Keep up with the blog. Adding articles to the blog on a consistent basis will bring in more traffic to the site via search engines and keep your site fresh.

Pricing page

• This page needs to be organized more clearly. The free plan is the same for all users so there’s no need to repeat it three times. Create a comparison chart that makes it easier to understand the options that you’re offering.

Here’s an example of a comparison chart from basecamphq.com.

More website critiques

Of course there are more things to dive deeply into making this site better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re viewing this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.