My Strider Website

[mb0509]

Very nice. And a Google page rank of 2 already? Jim Stowe told us that our new site will be up 12/10. I can see that its going to be another big learning curve. Most of the technical stuff mentioned here goes right over my head. However, I know that we made the correct choice with Strider.
Mike

I go live with my Strider site next Thursday, can't wait!
Mary

 

[Knife's Wife]

Wow, is that pretty! and classy! Only one comment... I'm not liking the font on the home page for the paragraph that starts "we are a family owned 4th generation..." It looks like the inter-letter spacing is odd. Maybe just changing the font size might fix it??

Thanks, Beth...I fixed the font does it look better?


Joan

 

[Knife's Wife]

Thanks for the great advice, and to answer your questions...

Color? or Colour? Who is your target market? Do you live in the US or Canada/UK? Well I am french but the site is a template from Strider (Canadia), I will e-mail Jim

The 'u' on us at the bottom right needs to be capitalize.

That main image I can't see in the html, so no alt text for image. I am not a SEO expert but if you were to slice that large image up in Photoshop, you could give each one a alt text name. I think Jim needs to fix this too, I will find out

the alt text for flower-1.gif is spelled flowr:
<!-- <img src="images/flower-1.gif" alt="Flowr" title="Flowr" align="left" /> This I have no idea if I can change, another e-mail

I like the colors, the image, scroll work, but a lot of empty space up top. Meta tags look good. I looked at in a 800x600 resolution and it looked bad. I have not seen stats for the amount of people who use this resolution anymore, but a few years back is was a lot.

There should be $ signs on the links on how much money people want to spend. I looked for missing $ signs did not see them

......page won't load now.

If I remember your old site, it was a WS cookie cutter one.. this new one is 100% better. Keep up the great work Joan.. almost there!

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback....as I pull my hair out!

 

[Sher]

Congrats Joan and welcome to the world of late night hours tweaking your site...lol
It is certainly better than having a wire service template and I know once you are able to scoot around and feel comfortable about it, you will reap the benefits. Best of luck to you!
Sher

 

[Knife's Wife]

Very nice, just a few things.

The image took a little long to load.

I agree with Beth about the text, maybe a little fancier, with all the scroll work. Although I do understand the necessity for the simplier fonts. I might try fancier, I only had about 3 weeks to with a holiday and so much else to sandwich in.

Biggest things for me are the balance in the header. I'd move the Search Bar down off the orchid into the white space below. This is a template site so I don't think there is much I can do about it but, good point!

Also, I'd move the shop name down, off the pretty scrollwork into the white space below.

The menu is a little hard to navigate, the mouse over feature causes cursor to pull up something besides what you wanted, a little irritating for someone trying to order.

Thanks for asking for the input, this helps all of us having sites built or building our own.

By the way if your thinking about a website, let a professional do it unless you have an endless amount of time to spend on it. It's harder than you think, ask Ryan. Too funny, it is a Strider template site, lol

Love the color and scrollwork!!!

Thank you for your input

Joan

 

[Knife's Wife]

Nice site! Congratulations!

Main thing I saw was: needs an "Order Now" button for each pic.

Good luck!!

Thanks!!! RYYYAAANN... can this be done??

 

[Knife's Wife]

Nice! Thanks!!

Safe to assume that's a temporary title tag? Yes, Bloomz temporary at least I hope

Be sure to fix that right away - very important.I'm on it...another e-mail to Jim

I also agree with the Daze - too much real estate taken up at the top pushing products below the fold. This has been mentioned... but I'm not quite sold on that concept, I like the clean look, with our name in your face! but, I will take a harder look at that.

I would also move the text of where you deliver to the bottom, but maybe that's just me. With our other site it was at the bottom, a lot of people would be on the site and then call us to see where we deliver.. so I thought I would try having it more visible from the get go.

I also would repeat at least some of the menu choices at the bottom with simple text links with descriptivve anchor text to help with interior pages being found - but I'm personally not a fan of javascript menus that have to be rolled over. Opinions vary on whether they index well, so I choose to be more cautious of them.

There's a missing image on the shipping page. Your image sizes are huge - thumbnails are 16-18K and larger product images 85K and they're not that big of images - need more image optimization for load times. (I try to keep my thumbs under 5K and larger images around 20K)
Was it for a particular item?? I'm confused

Please take as constructive feedback...Websites are always works in progress...Nice look...Congrats on being independent

Thanks Bloomz I really appreciate all the feedback I can receive or give.

Joan

 

[bloomz]

There's a missing image on the shipping page. Your image sizes are huge - thumbnails are 16-18K and larger product images 85K and they're not that big of images - need more image optimization for load times. (I try to keep my thumbs under 5K and larger images around 20K)
Was it for a particular item?? I'm confused

Joan

It seems to be all of the product images. If you right click on them and choose properties it tells you the size of the image. The thumbnails are it looks like about 16-18K and the larger images are 78-85K like your two dozen rose image is 81035 bytes (85K). In contrast the two dozen rose image I use is 21737 bytes and it's also a much larger image at about 1/4 the download time and byte size.

Hope that makes sense, trying to be helpful...

Oh and the missing image is on the Delivery page from the link at the bottom.
The missing one:

http://www.colemanflorist.com/uimages/image/coleman-florist-store-image.jpg

The correct link:

http://www.colemanflorist.com/uimages/coleman-florist-store-image.jpg

Oh I see it - that extra /image/ in the path to it.

Easy fix. Done that a zillion times myself.

OOPS the board shortens it so you can't see the whole path, but if you click on them you will see the top one is one directory too long.

 

[Beth]

Thanks, Beth...I fixed the font does it look better?


Joan

Yes, Joan, it looks much better!

 

[theRKF]

That main image I can't see in the html, so no alt text for image. I am not a SEO expert but if you were to slice that large image up in Photoshop, you could give each one a alt text name.

the alt text for flower-1.gif is spelled flowr:
<!-- <img src="images/flower-1.gif" alt="Flowr" title="Flowr" align="left" />

I looked at in a 800x600 resolution and it looked bad. I have not seen stats for the amount of people who use this resolution anymore, but a few years back is was a lot.

Daz,

No real benefit in slicing background images and alt-stuffing. It will actually increase load time instead of helping.

800x600 is around 6% of web traffic, now, and that includes people on mobile devices. The web design standard has been to design for 1024x768 for a couple years, now. I bet you'll love this: http://960.gs/

I would also move the text of where you deliver to the bottom, but maybe that's just me.

Your image sizes are huge - thumbnails are 16-18K and larger product images 85K and they're not that big of images - need more image optimization for load times. (I try to keep my thumbs under 5K and larger images around 20K)

Text lower on the page = less weight in search, and likely to not be read (fine print syndrome) by the user.

We'll re-run the image generation script - they are bit on the large side

Why did you change from a WS template?

The reason I ask is that I see a lot of FTD and TF images, which is fine.

I just question why spend the money on a new site if you are just going to use WS images anyway.

Our template sites are comparable in cost to TF sites and they don't look like 15,000 other florist websites

It's a way to differentiate yourself from the pack a bit.

Ryan

 

[thebloomcloset]

Happy

I also switched my site over to Strider and I am really happy.

Your website looks really good, but is the orchid image at the top upside down? It looks like it is to me....

 

[Knife's Wife]

o.k.

so why can't a florist use a WS template and enhance it with more SEO stuff?

why start from scratch when a florist can just keep changing meta and title tag descriptions to be better found on search engines?

joe

Joe,

I have had a heavily customized TF site since 2004, It has rank well in searches because I worked to get it listed everywhere from the beginning and customized it. Our site did very very well. but here is why I decided to change.

1) $3.00 per order was killing us with how many orders we receive.

2) e-mail list that was generated from the orders was not available to me. I had to record all info off each order my self and create a data base. My Strider site does that Automatically!

3)The marketing they did to my customers was only their special and did not have very good click through. Maybe 2 orders a month.

4)Teleflora drove me to drink with constantly adding a million new pics every few months and then I would have to remove them from the site and reprice the ones I wanted to keep. They would not listen to the fact that florist would like them added to the list , but let us activate them as we see fit for our site.

5) My favorite part is that I can create my own pages with information gallery whatever I want and change them on the fly.

6)Teleflora did not allow me to have links to sites like Florist Detective and others that I wanted to add. They would only approve 6 of my links.

Joan