Website review
When you click through to an individual product page, the first thought is that it seems a little busy, and could benefit from a little more white space. This could be achieved by removing the left-hand navigation and using that space to open up the page. Saying that, in general it is a well presented product page that gives all the information a user needs to make an informed decision. Features such as reviews, Q&A, description, bird types, articles and videos make it a page that oozes information.
When adding a product to the basket, the mini basket on the top right opens up and displays the product to confirm the addition, which is a nice touch and adds clarity. The basket page (pictured, right) is a pretty standard layout, which is good; the checkout pages that follow also conform to a standard. The simpler it is for the user, the more likely it is that he will convert to a sale. Retailers need to avoid revolutionising their site at this stage and go for standard practice to aid conversion.
A few pointers that may help increase the conversion and enhance the user journey on this page would be: • Remove the security logos from below the delivery options, they are already on the page in the footer. • I assume Enter your source code is a promotional code from the company’s catalogue. But this is unclear and needs clarification or relabelling. • Some of the alignment of fields and buttons need to be looked at. For example, the pricing of the delivery on my browser view is lower than the delivery description associated with it, and the update button also seems a little strange in its current position.
When proceeding through to the next step of the checkout and going to the your details page, visitors are met by a very simple page. At first the light blue box with text inside almost looks like an error message and is not as noticeable as the content on the white background below. On continuing to the next step, once the email is entered, the subsequent page is again a simple three-column page where a request for further contact details, such as invoice address and delivery address are asked for. There is a good autoaddress feature here that saves the user from typing in the whole address. One thing we would suggest on this page, to focus the users eye a little
have been optimised briefly, although they could be improved. • Use of Heading (H) tags, which are used by search engines to identify specific words, could be improved. • User friendly URLs, shorter with keywords and removing the session ID. • Further cross-pollination of linking articles to specific relevant site pages. • Check the configuration of the 301 redirect for www/non-www URLs; there would appear to be a number of pages through the site where titles and content may be being duplicated. • Page speed is 4.5/10. Improvement could be made by “leverage browser caching”, “optimisation of images” or “enabling compression”.
Overall, without knowing the budget spend on the redesign and development, we feel there is plenty of room for improvement, but the important thing is that it has been built on what we would consider to be a good and strong foundation. Northern Parrots has all the key features that you would look for in a well thought out ecommerce site. With the aid of some small changes in design and layout it would, in our view, become a high- converting site and a better experience for the user. We give it 7.5 out of 10.
more, would be to either place light-coloured vertical guidelines in between the columns, or place numbers 1,2 and 3 by each title, helping ground the flow. The next and final opportunity to come out of the sales process is a summary page. It again is a clear and informative page on what is being purchased, the address it is being delivered to and delivery options, as well as a final chance to enter a “source code”. The user is given the opportunity to pay via the site’s own payment gateway or to use PayPal.
The on-page design and structure is one thing, however Northern Parrots needs to promote the website to continue to drive new traffic. For this review we have also looked at search-engine optimisation (SEO), undoubtedly one of the most important online marketing techniques to implement. Below are some quick wins for SEO to consider:
• The site would benefit from better structured landing pages, targeting specific search phrases. Some pages
George Ioannou is head of creative at online marketing specialist Digital & Wise, a Maginus company.
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www.catalog-biz.com | Catalogue e-business | Direct Commerce
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