First Impression:
Nice but it has an unfinished feel to it, it is as if the designers hit a deadline and just published the site as is.
General layout and navigation:
The shopping cart image looks a bit lost and the ‘shopping cart’ text above it is invisible. The menu needs to be narrower, I would also reduce the size of the image text and arrows, you would need to remove the anti-aliasing from the image text (or just use plain text links). The ‘free shipping’ image on the front page is too big, make it smaller but change the colour to make it stand out. The introductory paragraph needs reformatting to emphasise the important points and make it easier to read at a glance. The links at the bottom of the page need to be moved to a more prominent position, except ‘legal’ and possibly ‘links’, perhaps they could keep the shopping cart image company? Many of your links open in a new window, this is very irritating. And why is there a customer service AND a FAQ link if they both go to the same page?
Page layout:
On the home and sub category pages the alignment of each product differs and the text is not horizontally aligned. On the main category pages and search results page the product titles are not vertically aligned. This makes it difficult to scan the page for a particular category or product. On the product display pages the text is too close to the menu, I found myself glancing across to the menu as I was trying to read the product descriptions.
On some pages (http://www.ruthiesmusic.com/saxophones is one) the content is too wide for the browser window.
Content:
You should feature your testimonials on the front page, along with the gift certificates, mailing list and lay-a-way plan.
Put your mailing address in the page footer, when ordering online it is comforting to know you can contact the company in the real world. Also, do you have retail premises? If so, mention them.
There is an error in your product search script, it generates a runtime error popup box.
I also notice that all your images are being pulled from another site, is there any reason for this?
Site Optimisation:
The written content is very keyword rich and the site has a good number of incoming links, but the onsite optimisation needs attention.
Using the same description and vast list of keywords on every page and just changing a few words in the title is not the way to get good rankings, or a high click through ratio. The title tag and description meta tag need to be targeted on every page – if somebody searches for a particular instrument then the targeted title will help the site get in the top ten results and the targeted description will persuade the person that your site has exactly what they are searching for and hence encourage them to click your link.
Your page layout is a little search engine unfriendly. Your product details on the category pages are in a table nested 5 levels deep, that’s an awful lot of code for a robot to fish through before it finds those all important product titles.
Another spider stopper is bad coding and your site has tags that are incorrectly nested. e.g.<b><font size=2><a href=/inc/pdetail?v=1&pid=412>EM
Winston 475L Gold Lacquer Student Trumpet</a></font></b> That tag </b> should after the tag.
Your product details pages need some dynamic title and meta tags. Imagine someone is looking for a Hondo H715 Electric Guitar, if your relevant product page had Hondo H715 Electric Guitar in the title and buy your Hondo H715 Electric Guitar here in the description, not only would it help your page appear at the top of the results but how could the searcher resist clicking on it?
PPC Listings:
If you are not getting traffic from these, or the traffic isn’t converting, then you may be bidding on the wrong keywords. You should also ensure that the title and description are targeted to the keyword it is appearing for.
In summary I would say that this site needs to be finished. Make the layout tidier, emphasise important information, streamline the code, optimise every page and check those PPC listings.
Amanda O’Donnell
N21 Internet – www.n21internet.com
