My first impression of the Crawford House Collectibles website was of a boring homepage. If I were in the market to buy collectibles, I would probably back out of the site and look elsewhere.
How would I improve this site? First, pep up the homepage! Put something exciting on it – maybe photos of best sellers, new products, or the promotion of the week. (When I clicked on the “Promo” link on an interior page, I found that there are no promotions currently offered. Get rid of the link if you’re not offering one, or better yet, DO offer a promotion at all times. And by varying your promotion, your repeat customers will want to check back to see what’s new.) Gray is a boring color for ecommerce, and the busy background makes it difficult to read the text. If you want it to be a “New Exciting Shopping Experience”, then it has to look exciting.
Put links to the product categories (Home & Office Dcor, Lawn & Patio, etc.) on the homepage. People don’t want to click through a “Store Directory” page to get to a product list, although you can also offer a product list as a secondary way to find what you’re offering, like a site map.
Each product category should have its own page, with thumbnails of the products and a brief description. Clicking on a thumbnail would bring up the product detail page, with the larger image, price, link to the basket, and a creative description. The current product descriptions are sparse and uninviting. Maybe in the collectibles market, these items sell themselves, but as a customer I would like to know more about the item. (E.g., the musical light set – what does it play? Father Christmas – what materials is he made with?) A paragraph about how to use it, where to put it, whom would be the perfect gift recipient of it, are just a few ideas that could be used to make the products more appealing.
You also need to work on the copy. It needs to be grammatically correct (on the registration page, “receive emails notifying you OF new products”, etc.). Check capitalization and punctuation rules. Remove the extraneous underlines and quotation marks that are used for emphasis; instead use different fonts, colors, text size, etc. Remember that if everything is emphasized, the net effect is that nothing is.
Make your email address a link (mailto: ); change your link colors either to the standard blue/purple or at least to something that can be read more easily on your background; improve your search engine. Searching on the word “lawn”, which is one of your categories, found nothing. In fact, for the search engine to find something, you really have to know what’s there to begin with.
The “Store Directory” page is really a “Guarantee” page, misnamed. I’m also wondering how many people buy the catalog for $10. If you get catalog sales from the site, I’d put a link to the Catalog detail page on the homepage.
I can’t comment on how the basket worked, because every time I tried to add something to it, I got an error message.
The site certainly looks like it has potential. The image files were small and the pages fast-loading. I’m not into collectibles, but the pictures were attractive and technically well done (composition, lighting, uniformity). However, a more attractive homepage, paired with a logical site re-structuring, would vastly improve this ecommerce website.
Carol Harkins
www.CyberGnarus.com
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