Dear DownTownYpsi,
We are renovating our websites and we thought people on this blog could give us some great advice. Our store has been open for 1 year and we are starting to get quite a bit of out-of-town traffic visiting our store - which is good for us and all of Ypsi, too. Any improvements we can bring to our site might also help Ypsi in the long run. We are working on
www.LookInTheAttic.Com and www.SilverAndGold.Com
We were hoping folks here might have a moment to take a peek at them and tell us your thoughts for improvements? JohnC
JohnC,
Out of curiosity, why the two different websites?
As for feedback, my first reaction to lookintheattic.com is "Oy, the headers!" The top of that page seems a little too busy - silverandgold.com's headers are both more elegant and usable in their relative cleanness. As an attempt to suggest a solution, do you need to have the major categories listed both horizontally across the top of the page and in the text down the side? I think you could do without the horizontal listing with the big pictures - clean up the headers and get to content faster.
Also, I'm having some weirdness with the picture in the middle of the page - the "luxury - less about money, more about fashion". If I click in different parts of that picture, I seem to go to different places that I didn't expect to. Are there links layered underneath that picture?
I do like the 3-column general organization scheme. On the left sidebar, I think the colored category headings of silverandgold.com are easier to pick out than the greys of lookintheattic.com
And that's as much free input as I'll give for now. Happy 1 year!
I will echo Murph's comments about both pages. silverandgold is much easier to read. I do like that you make it very easy to find things on both sites. It's what helped me find my brother and sister in law a gift this Christmas. I didn't know you had a jewelery business too. Now I am off to browse it rather than working. :)
Thank you Melissa and Murph - we appreciate the advice. The front photo does have some clickable remants - we will remove those. Oh, and we have a half dozen or so different websites. It is done to segment products and marketing - that is the only reason. Thanks!
Segmentation: you've got more sites, too? I'd recommend putting links between all of them on some reasonably easy to find location on each site. It looks like Silver & Gold has a link to Look in the Attic (the "parent" business, I take it), but I don't see a particular reason why you shouldn't cross-advertise between them. Might be that a browser likes your style, but isn't really shopping for anything in that particular segment - you could direct them to the site that might have what they're looking for.
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