New Member - would love review/feedback for online store

[Gampopa]

Hi: New to this forum. I've read through lots of postings and thanks for the excellent information. We've got a website Ancient Ways Botanicals (ancientwaysbotanicals.com) that's been up for about a year and a half. Would love any feedback. Am getting ready to do an adwords campaign. I'm particularly interested in loading speed for pages. Some people have said they load slowly others haven't had a problem. GoDaddy is our host. We've talked about moving it to a dedicated server but just don't have the $$ for it. Thanks for any input!

Andrew

[vangogh]

Seems ok at first glance. I think your logo blends in a little too much with the navigation to the right of it. At first I mistook it for another link. Probably something you want to make more visually important. I also think it would be a good idea to get some text higher up on the page. With my browser open full I don't see any immediate and obvious information telling me who you are or what you do. I notice it once I start looking around, but nothing jumps out at me right away and it's possible I might leave before taking the time to find out.

If the logo were more obviously a logo it would help. In fact. I'd probably remove the images in the navigation. I'm not sure they really help communicate what people will find and because you already have the images below it creates a lot of areas competing for my attention.

You have a lot of content and I can't claim to have read it all, but I looked around a bit and it generally seems good. Overall the layout works. I'd make the text larger since it can be hard for older eyes like mine to read. Good to see you're blogging and the blog looks pretty good.

I think the biggest change I would make would be in the navigation. I'd rather see product categories than the single products in the main navigation. You have a lot and they probably wouldn't all fit in a horizontal navigation bar. Maybe if you could organize all the products into 2 or 3 groups you could work them into a horizontal bar. If not I would probably go for another theme where you can include a vertical menu on the right or left. I'd definitely remove the images from the navigation. You want the images to show off the products, but because I think the product images get lost a little when the navigational images are present.

Hope that helps.

[Harold Mansfield]

I'm particularly interested in loading speed for pages. Some people have said they load slowly others haven't had a problem. GoDaddy is our host. We've talked about moving it to a dedicated server but just don't have the $$ for it. Thanks for any input!


I just want to comment on the hosting thing. You don't need a dedicated server for one website. Unless you are getting a crap load of traffic, you aren't running anything complicated enough to warrant the expense.
Slow loading could be a symptom of many different things from plug in conflicts, bad or sloppy coding, mistakes in the custom CSS file (one missed comma can throw a monkey wrench on your whole program), 3rd party scripts loading and of course your host. Go Daddy is well known for overloaded servers.

My advice would be to have someone look at it and determine where the loads are and correct them, and I also recommend a new host. Bluehost, Hostgator, Network Solutions...there are a many to choose from. Just stick to companies that actually own the equipment instead of 3rd party resellers. And 24/7 phone support comes in handy.

[vangogh]

I missed the hosting question. I agree you probably don't need dedicated hosting. If you want to step up your hosting look first to a virtual private server (VPS) It's a level in between shared and dedicated hosting and starts around $50/month.

However, you might just want to see what you can do to optimize performance first. Here's a browser extension from Yahoo called YSLow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/). It's available for many browsers and when you run it, it will grade your site's performance and offer suggestions for improving it. You may or may not know how to implement all the suggestions, but at least you'll have some ideas what to research further. You don't have to adopt all their suggestions either.

Since you run a WordPress site, do you have a caching plugin installed. The two big name cache plugins are W3 Total Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/) and WP Super Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/). W3 Total Cache can do more, but it takes more work to configure it. The idea behind caching is that instead of the site having to hit the database for every visit, it creates temporary static files for many of the visits. This reduces the load on the database and server and helps to speed up the site.

[Harold Mansfield]

There's also this performance plug in:
WordPress › P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) « WordPress Plugins (http://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/)
It will show you exactly what takes the longest to load or resolve on your site.
It's kind of a catch22...if your site is already running slow, installing another plug in and running a scan may take a while, but it is pretty good at what it does.

[Gampopa]

Thanks for the suggestions! I really appreciate them. I too thought there should be some text above the slider so people landing on the page have some idea of what the website is about w/ having to scroll down. Hadn't thought about the images in the navigation being problematic or that the logo is blending in. Our website developer was really pushing us to have lots of images. Will have to look at this again. We did have W3 caching installed but deactivated it because it was crashing the site (I don't remember exactly what was going on. Maybe will try Super cache.) We just haven't had much traffic. Started doing a Google adwords campaign this week and are getting a little more traffic but not much in sales. 1 sale for 72 clicks.

[websiteop]

To speed up your site you could utilize browser caching, decreasing the amount of javascript and css external calls, which is a known wordpress issue from all of the plugins, etc. The one thing you want to think about once your sales start to grow is to switch to a better hosting company/infrastructure like Rackspace - Godaddy got hacked a few months ago and unless you can afford to be down for a while, a better hosting co. is the best solution. (Not that other cos. haven't been hacked, not saying that) The design could be more professional in my view, it looks like someone hacked up a woothemes theme, there are ways to make it look more seamless, thats my 2 cents, hope it helps! :)

[gkmorris40]

Site looks good. I would eliminate the navigational images at the top of the page and use text only. Also, I'd change the font in the navigation at the top of the page. The current font does not look professional and is not consistent with the rest of the site. I would also move the navigational bar down, make the logo a little larger, add a tag line that gives some immediate info re: who you are and what you do/offer. Also, I'd create a little more white space at the very top of the page. Otherwise, the site and the content look great. Good job.

Re: loading speeds, I don't think it's a problem. I tried it on two different computers and connections and it was fine. No need to switch to a dedicated server. That would be an unnecessary expense.

Good luck!

[vangogh]

@Harold - I wasn't aware of that plugin. I'm running a scan now


Thanks for the suggestions!

Glad we could help. By the way there's nothing wrong with images. It's more that by having so many they start to compete with each other. You want the design of the page to call out what's most important and direct someone's eye to that. When too many things are competing, the eye can't rest on the important information. Navigation isn't really where you want people to focus. You want them to know it's there, but the images call your attention to it instead of letting the eye rest on the content.

I hope that makes sense.