What do you think about this website?

[Mark Atkinson]

Sjoe. Where to start...

Quite a long wait for anything to appear on the first page load of a first visit, and I'm on a pretty high speed connection right now

Half the problem is that the site is on a US server and a slow one at that. If you're serving local clientèle I highly recommend running your website be hosted on a local server. Other than that the site, being a CMS site (Joomla), is reasonably well optimised from my brief overview.

As for the actual appeal of the site - I'm not the biggest fan. I sort of like the idea behind the header but the final product definitely feels very unpolished. Things are cut off where they shouldn't be, there are overlaps where elements should be in line and overall it just comes across as disjointed.

As Adrianh pointed out, the grammar and spelling is not great and for a Grammar Nazi like me that comes across as extremely unprofessional. Not everyone is Charles Dickens, but if you can't write well or English is not your first language, you should definitely hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The menu feels cluttered and keeps bugging out when I use it in Chrome. It's very easy for your mouse to slide off the edge and the menu disappears. This can become pretty frustrating as you have several nested categories coming out of a single main menu item. I'd look to serve your top level categories as fixed items on your main menu bar if at all possible. The images on the menu categories is kind of a decent idea, but again it feels unrefined. It looks almost like they were just stuck on as an afterthought, rather than the menu designed with the images in mind.

The font you use on your logo and certain headings (Newswire) is very difficult to read and I think your brand will suffer in the long run because of it. Just because it's a cool looking font doesn't mean it's fit for a purpose where readability is key.

If I had to guess, I'd say this site was built using a lower cost template (around $20, or possibly even free) as opposed to being a premium template which would cost $50-100. I'm sorry, but it just feels scrappy.

Other small issues I have:

- There are little to no trust factors on the site. Mastercard and Visa logos don't in the slightest convince me to buy from you when I can't see any phone numbers, addresses, testimonials, listings on price comparison engines like Pricecheck, etc. I'd be extremely wary of buying from your site and would probably pay a premium to a more trustworthy site for peace of mind.

- You don't seem to use an SSL certificate to secure your site/checkout process. (Another trust factor)


I'm sorry for what may seem like harsh feedback, but succeeding with e-commerce is not easy. There are hundreds of factors which contribute to an online store's success and you need to be doing a vast majority of those things well before you'll see your site do well.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Quite a long wait for anything to appear on the first page load of a first visit, and I'm on a pretty high speed connection right now

I know it can be tricky to resolve (I have a similar problem with TFSA which I still haven't managed to beat back to where I'd like to see it), but with an online shopping site page load time is pretty important.

If you can get the header area to display quickly at the very least, it would already be a big improvement.

Hi Dave, we tested our site from a local server and its 2 seconds faster then yuppiechef.com and 2 seconds faster the kalahari.net and we are still working on improving the speed. We get what you are saying with the header area, if the customer can see something happening while it happens they feel its not that slow, we are working on certain elements appearing faster. We just lunched the site so now comes all the improvements.Thank you for the comment please if there's anything else let us know.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Home page should have something about the company, with a few featured products. Departments ... Electronics should be PC components . me thinks. Also think you should lose the black. I also think e.g I looked for desktop hard drives, and the page loaded about 15, it is just too much choice and perhaps the reason some pages load so slow.

Hi vieome, thanks for the tip on "something about the company" we are actually working on that we like the idea of changing the Electronics to PC components we are going to change it. I know some people don't like the black but we like it due to it's uniqueness, I mean how many black sites do you see. 15 products may seam like to much but some customers finds it too frustrating to have to go trough more pages because there's not enough products on a page so we have to strike the balance just right. Keep the comments coming it helps us improve the site

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Sjoe. Where to start...



Half the problem is that the site is on a US server and a slow one at that. If you're serving local clientèle I highly recommend running your website be hosted on a local server. Other than that the site, being a CMS site (Joomla), is reasonably well optimised from my brief overview.

As for the actual appeal of the site - I'm not the biggest fan. I sort of like the idea behind the header but the final product definitely feels very unpolished. Things are cut off where they shouldn't be, there are overlaps where elements should be in line and overall it just comes across as disjointed.

As Adrianh pointed out, the grammar and spelling is not great and for a Grammar Nazi like me that comes across as extremely unprofessional. Not everyone is Charles Dickens, but if you can't write well or English is not your first language, you should definitely hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The menu feels cluttered and keeps bugging out when I use it in Chrome. It's very easy for your mouse to slide off the edge and the menu disappears. This can become pretty frustrating as you have several nested categories coming out of a single main menu item. I'd look to serve your top level categories as fixed items on your main menu bar if at all possible. The images on the menu categories is kind of a decent idea, but again it feels unrefined. It looks almost like they were just stuck on as an afterthought, rather than the menu designed with the images in mind.

The font you use on your logo and certain headings (Newswire) is very difficult to read and I think your brand will suffer in the long run because of it. Just because it's a cool looking font doesn't mean it's fit for a purpose where readability is key.

If I had to guess, I'd say this site was built using a lower cost template (around $20, or possibly even free) as opposed to being a premium template which would cost $50-100. I'm sorry, but it just feels scrappy.

Other small issues I have:

- There are little to no trust factors on the site. Mastercard and Visa logos don't in the slightest convince me to buy from you when I can't see any phone numbers, addresses, testimonials, listings on price comparison engines like Pricecheck, etc. I'd be extremely wary of buying from your site and would probably pay a premium to a more trustworthy site for peace of mind.

- You don't seem to use an SSL certificate to secure your site/checkout process. (Another trust factor)


I'm sorry for what may seem like harsh feedback, but succeeding with e-commerce is not easy. There are hundreds of factors which contribute to an online store's success and you need to be doing a vast majority of those things well before you'll see your site do well.

Hi Mark, Sjoe. Where to start.. hahhahaha

The server problem - We are hosting with hostgator and they are experiencing some trouble with there servers due to server trouble over the last couple of months. We host with them because no body in South Africa can offer what we need for the price, we have been with Godaddy before and a few South African hosts as well and our experiences with them hasn't been very good and performance was either the same or worse and it cost more, to be able to get the same package we have now we would pay an arm and a leg locally.

As for the actual appeal of the site - Some like it some don't and we respect everyone's opinions. Do you mind elaborating more on which parts feel unpolished, cut off, overlaping and disjointed so we can have a look at them, please keep in mind we do have our own unique style, I mean if we wanted to look like takeallot or kalahari we would go and buy the template and we don't like the same old feel of those sites. Don't get us wrong there good but in our opinion it's been done to many times.

Grammar - we are working on our grammar and thank you for pointing it out to us.

Menus - We actually talked about the menu drop out functionality and we are planing on making it easier to use. We are looking into the menu and have a few ideas. Why do you say the images in the menu looks like an afterthought?

We have seen a lot of temples cheap and expensive and so good and some bad, you of all people should know you use what you got and you make the best of it. You know how much hard work goes into making a good website, to some it might be good to some it might be crappy. If your hung up on the cost of the template rather then the website as a whole and what has been done to get it that way then your judging the site based on the amount of money put into.

Trust factor - the reason we don't have any phone numbers on the site is because we can't handle all the call's as of yet, thus you will be on hold the whole time and that's bad customer service. We will be adding a phone number in the future once we have the infrastructure. What the address in concerned we are busy moving to a different location. We are working on getting on price comparison engines but we do require some time. The payment gateway we are getting ready to use has it's own SSL but we were thinking of activating our SSL in the shopping cart we just need our host to sort out there server trouble or it might slow us down even more.

Thank you for all the advise and feedback, all this helps us improve and you need to keep in mind that we are in a start up phase so like any site there are bugs to sort out but with all our customers feedback and yours we will get there to bring you the customer the shopping experience you want. Our site might not be everyone's taste our style but nobody can please everybody.Please keep the comments and suggestions coming, it helps us improve and you get to see us become better.

[Dave A]

The server problem - We are hosting with hostgator and they are experiencing some trouble with there servers due to server trouble over the last couple of months.

Years more like it. Hostgator is an overseller, one of the biggest. And the moment you start needing a bit of processing power or get a bit of traffic you're in deep trouble due to their (unadvertised, but very real) concurrent connections limit.

We host with them because no body in South Africa can offer what we need for the price

You're not getting what you need from Hostgator already (and based on others and my experience with them, with what you are trying to do you probably never will )

Look for a thread on hosting in the TFSA Locals forum for a recommendation (or more).

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Years more like it. Hostgator is an overseller, one of the biggest. And the moment you start needing a bit of processing power or get a bit of traffic you're in deep trouble due to their (unadvertised, but very real) concurrent connections limit.


You're not getting what you need from Hostgator already (and based on others and my experience with them, with what you are trying to do you probably never will )

Look for a thread on hosting in the TFSA Locals forum for a recommendation (or more).

Thanks Dave we will definitely have a look, thank you. What are you looking for in an online store?

[Mark Atkinson]

The server problem - We are hosting with hostgator and they are experiencing some trouble with there servers due to server trouble over the last couple of months. We host with them because no body in South Africa can offer what we need for the price, we have been with Godaddy before and a few South African hosts as well and our experiences with them hasn't been very good and performance was either the same or worse and it cost more, to be able to get the same package we have now we would pay an arm and a leg locally.

We've had a pretty good experience with Hetzner. With any shared hosting provider you're always going to run the risk of servers being blacklisted etc, so we eventually decided to rent our own dedicated server from them. Even so, if you're a start-up, paying R200 a month is an expense that is well worth the rewards.

As for the actual appeal of the site - Some like it some don't and we respect everyone's opinions. Do you mind elaborating more on which parts feel unpolished, cut off, overlaping and disjointed so we can have a look at them, please keep in mind we do have our own unique style, I mean if we wanted to look like takeallot or kalahari we would go and buy the template and we don't like the same old feel of those sites. Don't get us wrong there good but in our opinion it's been done to many times.

All I'm going to say here is that there is good reason why those sites look like they do and are laid out like they are. They both pay several people significant amounts of money to run conversion testing and turn that data into designs that work. Also, neither one uses a template that you can go out and buy.

Menus - We actually talked about the menu drop out functionality and we are planing on making it easier to use. We are looking into the menu and have a few ideas. Why do you say the images in the menu looks like an afterthought?

It just doesn't look like they were meant to be there. It's difficult to explain but from a design point of view it just doesn't fit for me.

We have seen a lot of temples cheap and expensive and so good and some bad, you of all people should know you use what you got and you make the best of it. You know how much hard work goes into making a good website, to some it might be good to some it might be crappy. If your hung up on the cost of the template rather then the website as a whole and what has been done to get it that way then your judging the site based on the amount of money put into.

I'm certainly not judging the website based on the amount of money put into it, because I don't know how much money has been put in it. What I did do was make an assumption based on the look of the website. How right I was, only you will know.

I've seen some very good websites built using free templates, but they're not something you come across often.

Trust factor - the reason we don't have any phone numbers on the site is because we can't handle all the call's as of yet, thus you will be on hold the whole time and that's bad customer service. We will be adding a phone number in the future once we have the infrastructure. What the address in concerned we are busy moving to a different location. We are working on getting on price comparison engines but we do require some time. The payment gateway we are getting ready to use has it's own SSL but we were thinking of activating our SSL in the shopping cart we just need our host to sort out there server trouble or it might slow us down even more.

How many calls are you expecting, really? One of our e-commerce clients was clearing 10,000 unique visitors a month at a decent conversion rate and up until recently ran as a one man show using only a cell phone. Unless you've got some major investment going in terms of advertising, I'm really not sure what infrastructure you need in these early stages.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

We've had a pretty good experience with Hetzner. With any shared hosting provider you're always going to run the risk of servers being blacklisted etc, so we eventually decided to rent our own dedicated server from them. Even so, if you're a start-up, paying R200 a month is an expense that is well worth the rewards.


All I'm going to say here is that there is good reason why those sites look like they do and are laid out like they are. They both pay several people significant amounts of money to run conversion testing and turn that data into designs that work. Also, neither one uses a template that you can go out and buy.


It just doesn't look like they were meant to be there. It's difficult to explain but from a design point of view it just doesn't fit for me.



I'm certainly not judging the website based on the amount of money put into it, because I don't know how much money has been put in it. What I did do was make an assumption based on the look of the website. How right I was, only you will know.

I've seen some very good websites built using free templates, but they're not something you come across often.



How many calls are you expecting, really? One of our e-commerce clients was clearing 10,000 unique visitors a month at a decent conversion rate and up until recently ran as a one man show using only a cell phone. Unless you've got some major investment going in terms of advertising, I'm really not sure what infrastructure you need in these early stages.

Hi Mark, thanks for the feedback much appreciated. If you have more tips please feel free, the only way were going to improve is by learning and growing. Who know's maybe you will buy from us one day and we are expanding into a whole lot more category's not just PC components.

[TheElectrician]

Hi league of ordinary men,

I agree with a few things that have been said here, especially in regards to the load time associated with the pages. With the large amount you got going on, it doesn't matter what speed my internet is, it is also down to the hosting company. What I would very strongly recommend is that you upgrade your package with your web hosting company to no longer be "shared hosting". It will probably cost in the region of R600 pm, but what it means is your site will have its own server, and not compete with other websites your hosting company has, in regard to accessibility. It is actually a rather quick fix, and I know you can do it in a very straight forward manner on Afrihosts Clientzone. It should propagate within 2-48 hours, and your load time will be a lot faster. This can be especially important as Google likes to give users the best possible experience, and it tends to (albeit slightly) demote sites that have a long load time.

From a purely SEO point of view, I am afraid I am going to have to (in the nicest possible way), fail you miserably. I see you have a very limited back link profile, with no substantial high quality links to your site that Google / Bing can feed off of. I Googled "Buy Samsung products online South Africa", and variants of that; and gave up after a few pages (Which is more than a potential customer would go through). I have repeated this with a few of your products, and I am afraid you aren't ranking I can also assume you have a rather low RFT (Return from traffic), as your site interface, while quite cool and technically challenging to build, doesn't appeal to "web morons" as I like to call them. These are the people who use the internet for Facebook and the odd purchase. When designing something like this, you need to ensure the ultimate in simplicity and functionality. Not every one is capable of designing things like this, and those who can tend to "show off" which detracts from the user experience and lowers your RFT. I have been guilty of it myself, so no judgement is being passed :P...

Spelling is also impeccably important. Not only does it show to a client that you are capable, meticulous and worthy of their money, but Google and Bing rely heavily on it. Why would it rank you if you have the same spelling and grammar as cheap Viagra sites (Excuse the crassness)? Also, if you view your website with Google Chrome, and push "Ctrl and U'', you will see that your HTML coding is a disaster. This needs to be sorted out as soon as you can. This is what a SE reads, and it is akin to the handwriting of a dyslexic blind kid. I can only presume you used a WYSIWYG program to create it? These are a disaster, and I would recommend Wordpress or Pretsashop for the build (Make the template yourself if you can. Artisteer is available for about R600 on their website, and it is effectively WYSISYG, but offline and produces some beautiful code).

Lastly, WHY ARE THERE NO SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS ON YOUR WEBSITE ?!?!?!?!?! Sometimes people need that extra push into buying! If you have a column that shows your 3000 likes and 13 000 Twitter followers (I don't know how many you actually have), then people are going to ease into it; with a small possibility of being angry that they didn't hear about this sooner! People aren't going to put their credit card information into a site they don't know or not sure if others know. Instead of researching you etc, they are just going to use your competition, as clicking "back" is a lot easier than spending 15 minutes checking out your legitimacy. In my opinion, I think the end of the day you have to take a deep breath, look at it, and realize that sometimes design can be sacrificed to increase profit. It can be painful, but sometimes you just have to cry while holding a pillow over its head, hoping it is reincarnated into something better. I also won't go into your metadata or keywords too much, just please sort this out if you can. I'm running out of metaphors.

I have had clients in the online shopping industry before, with testimonials you can check out on my website at http://www.webvitality.co.za. I have increased PAYING traffic by nearly 900% pm in less than 6 months in some cases. If you would like to know more, send me an email at Kyle@webvitality.co.za and I can send you a quote if you are unable to do it yourself.

Good luck with it all,

Kyle

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Hi league of ordinary men,

I agree with a few things that have been said here, especially in regards to the load time associated with the pages. With the large amount you got going on, it doesn't matter what speed my internet is, it is also down to the hosting company. What I would very strongly recommend is that you upgrade your package with your web hosting company to no longer be "shared hosting". It will probably cost in the region of R600 pm, but what it means is your site will have its own server, and not compete with other websites your hosting company has, in regard to accessibility. It is actually a rather quick fix, and I know you can do it in a very straight forward manner on Afrihosts Clientzone. It should propagate within 2-48 hours, and your load time will be a lot faster. This can be especially important as Google likes to give users the best possible experience, and it tends to (albeit slightly) demote sites that have a long load time.

From a purely SEO point of view, I am afraid I am going to have to (in the nicest possible way), fail you miserably. I see you have a very limited back link profile, with no substantial high quality links to your site that Google / Bing can feed off of. I Googled "Buy Samsung products online South Africa", and variants of that; and gave up after a few pages (Which is more than a potential customer would go through). I have repeated this with a few of your products, and I am afraid you aren't ranking I can also assume you have a rather low RFT (Return from traffic), as your site interface, while quite cool and technically challenging to build, doesn't appeal to "web morons" as I like to call them. These are the people who use the internet for Facebook and the odd purchase. When designing something like this, you need to ensure the ultimate in simplicity and functionality. Not every one is capable of designing things like this, and those who can tend to "show off" which detracts from the user experience and lowers your RFT. I have been guilty of it myself, so no judgement is being passed :P...

Spelling is also impeccably important. Not only does it show to a client that you are capable, meticulous and worthy of their money, but Google and Bing rely heavily on it. Why would it rank you if you have the same spelling and grammar as cheap Viagra sites (Excuse the crassness)? Also, if you view your website with Google Chrome, and push "Ctrl and U'', you will see that your HTML coding is a disaster. This needs to be sorted out as soon as you can. This is what a SE reads, and it is akin to the handwriting of a dyslexic blind kid. I can only presume you used a WYSIWYG program to create it? These are a disaster, and I would recommend Wordpress or Pretsashop for the build (Make the template yourself if you can. Artisteer is available for about R600 on their website, and it is effectively WYSISYG, but offline and produces some beautiful code).

Lastly, WHY ARE THERE NO SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS ON YOUR WEBSITE ?!?!?!?!?! Sometimes people need that extra push into buying! If you have a column that shows your 3000 likes and 13 000 Twitter followers (I don't know how many you actually have), then people are going to ease into it; with a small possibility of being angry that they didn't hear about this sooner! People aren't going to put their credit card information into a site they don't know or not sure if others know. Instead of researching you etc, they are just going to use your competition, as clicking "back" is a lot easier than spending 15 minutes checking out your legitimacy. In my opinion, I think the end of the day you have to take a deep breath, look at it, and realize that sometimes design can be sacrificed to increase profit. It can be painful, but sometimes you just have to cry while holding a pillow over its head, hoping it is reincarnated into something better. I also won't go into your metadata or keywords too much, just please sort this out if you can. I'm running out of metaphors.

I have had clients in the online shopping industry before, with testimonials you can check out on my website at http://www.webvitality.co.za. I have increased PAYING traffic by nearly 900% pm in less than 6 months in some cases. If you would like to know more, send me an email at Kyle@webvitality.co.za and I can send you a quote if you are unable to do it yourself.

Good luck with it all,

Kyle

Good morning Kyle, I have to say your comment cracked me up and I get where your coming from, that's why we are redesigning the site and the new one will be up soon and it's like you said sometimes you have to sacrifice design for simplicity for the sake of your clients.You have some really good advise and we already talked about switching to a local hosting company, we will be doing some more work on SEO as well as the coding and all the other things that needs fixing.Thank you very much for the advise some off you metaphors cracked us up, who knows maybe we will make use off your services someday and you can look back at our site and say you had a helping hand in making it what it is now and like we said keep all the comments coming so we can improve and please checkout the new site when its up soon and tell us what you think.