My Site, PurpleLily Designs

[purplelilyone]

Well here goes. I designed and put this site together myself with no prior knowlege or know how. It has been up for about 2 months and though I have almost 1000 people that viewed it, I am not having success with many sales. Any comments or suggestions that are helpful would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time,

Joanne

[Janice]

Joanne, it's very nice! The colours are wonderful, and your work is just gorgeous!!!

Just so there's a little less text on the main page:

On your site you say: "This is our slogan and we work hard to keep our work inspirational, functional, enduring, and long lasting through fashion trends." I wonder if you could say something like: "Inspirational, functional, enduring, and long lasting through fashion trends."

And instead of the "PurpleLily Designs: Jewelry Accessories that invoke inspiration of beauty to the mind, body, and spirit." a couple of lines below the title, could you add directly below "* Lampwork & Polymer Clay Beads * Wire & Beaded Jewelry *": "accessories that invoke inspiration of beauty to the mind, body, and spirit."

On the "About" page, I find that the centered paragraphs are difficult to read. The centered headings are fine, but when there's that much text, it's hard on the brain .

The "Gallery" page for some reason, loads way over on the right for me and I have to scroll way over (I'm using Safari on my iMac with OSX). I don't know enough about html to tell you how to fix it! :)

I'd put your "Showcase" and "Guestbook" buttons at the bottom of the pages, and put your title "Purple Lily Designs" above the photos that appear at the top of each page, rather than down below the buttons.

You've done an amazing job for your first attempt. Wow! =D>

J.

[Kara]

Having a gallery and a showcase is a little redundant. Put all your photos in one or the other. If you have to, you can make a main gallery page with links to specific images like necklaces, beads, bracelets, etc.

You bio page: when you have a lot of text, having it all be centered is hard to read. You are much better off making it right justified and adding some images to break the amount of text up, like maybe a photo of your studio, a pet or even you!

On the jewelry page there are 5 blank table boxes before the items start, the blank boxes should be after. Maybe have a description of each item. I would also suggest making one page for shopping. Call it something that tells the visitor it is stuff for sale. Then have your links to jewelry and beads on that page. The Jewelry and Beads links just seem like more gallery type pages to me and don't really give me that desire to go and click on them to buy stuff.

Another thing that might help generate some sales is to maybe feature an item on the main page as a special or spotlighted item, reduce it in price or offer a bonus with it. Change this item once a month or so to keep people coming back to check on it. Or you can do this on the shopping page to get people to come check out that page, just make sure you put a notice up on your main page about it.

Your design is really nice. I think you have a strong foundation to work with and you really have done an awesome job with it from scratch! Your jewelry is beautiful. If I had some extra money I'd love to buy stuff!

[Janice]

Having a gallery and a showcase is a little redundant. Put all your photos in one or the other. If you have to, you can make a main gallery page with links to specific images like necklaces, beads, bracelets, etc.

Kara, I think the reason that Joanne did this is because the jewellery that is shown in the "Showcase" has been made by other artists with her beads; the jewellery in the "Gallery" is made by Purple Lily Designs.

Joanne, maybe you could make that distinction more obvious somehow by way of an explanation of the "Showcase"?

J.

[purplelilyone]

Thank you for your time ladies, and yes I think I may need to clarify the difference that you pointed out with the "gallery" and "showcase". I will right justiy the print with the text as well. You both brought out points that I will have to look at more. Like I said this is my first attempt.

[Geneva]

Hey Dear,
Miss you and the kids. It's like I lost a daughter to the big city of Atlanta. Your work gets better end better every time I see it. Like I told you before you left, you are one of the most creative artists I have ever had in the studio.
Your website is great. Kara and Janice are right. All you need to do is tweek it a little and get some links. Tell people about yourself, get those specials up. Several sites I've noticed have drawings and daily or weekly specials to draw people back to the site more than one time.
PM me your address: you've got to try some of the dark pink urobino of Rosio's. It just got in a couple of weeks ago.
Geneva

[purplelilyone]

Hey Dear,
Miss you and the kids. It's like I lost a daughter to the big city of Atlanta. Your work gets better end better every time I see it. Like I told you before you left, you are one of the most creative artists I have ever had in the studio.
Your website is great. Kara and Janice are right. All you need to do is tweek it a little and get some links. Tell people about yourself, get those specials up. Several sites I've noticed have drawings and daily or weekly specials to draw people back to the site more than one time.
PM me your address: you've got to try some of the dark pink urobino of Rosio's. It just got in a couple of weeks ago.
Geneva


Thanks Geneva, I didn't get lost! lol. I miss you soooooo much. The girls miss coming to the shop too. Thanks for your comments, I will do my best to better the site like you said. ANd thanks for the glass. Yeeeepeeeeee!!!!!!

[Laurie L]

Hello

The thing I experienced was that your pics are too small in some areas. I hate having to click on each individual picture to view it larger. They are a nice size on your initial page, but too small on your beads page. Also some of your pics appear grainy, the backgrounds are a bit distracting - I end up looking at your table top rather than your beads. In some shots you have the table top you shot the pictures on in focus and your beads are out of focus. Another shot you farthest away bead ( at back ) is in focus and the closest are all out of focus. Some pics all the beads are out of focus. The lighting you have from the left side is washing a lot of the colors out of the beads on the left and or putting a glare on them. Its just little things like that that make the representation of the bead itself hard to see the way they would up close and in person. These are easy enough fixes....just finding ways to achieve better pics.

Lastly your headers appear on everypage, which is fine - but I find them too large. When I hit beads - the same header appeared and I had to scroll down a ways to see some beads, at first I wasnt even sure if the page had changed and I was on the beads page. I think it would be great to have the bead pics pop up immediatly high enough so that you see them and the viewer knows the page has changed.

The text is hard to read on the black background. Have you tried grey instead of white text ?

Honestly you did an awsome job for a first try - seriously. A lot better than some sites I have seen where people have been doing webdesign for a while.

Remember the old saying that it takes 7 views of the same object for it to stick into a shoppers mind. Its like placing an ad in the newspaper....you need to do it 7 times before your noticed. I think with websites it may take longer.

[chrisann]

Hi Joanne,
I wanted to give you my 2 cents as well LOL. I have been spending a vast amount of time looking at all dif kinds of websites so I know what I want when I re-vamp mine. IMO your idea is very well thought out but like everyone else said needs tweaking. This is what jumped out at me...

1. Your website name needs to be either above the banner pics of maybe right below it and I agree the Font should be bigger.
2. The buttons need to go some where below the banner pics and website name.
3. I looked last night at work first (on dial-up) and everything was extremely slow to load. Today at home I am on cable and not so slow.
4. the pictures in your bead pages are pretty small IMO you will lose potential customers as they are hard to see. I would make those bigger and make the larger ones when you click on the small pics a bit smaller.
5. You might want to say "designer showcase" or maybe "customer showcase" or something like that to seperate from your work.

Good luck and better you than me LOL, I hate mine, giving up and having someone do a new one for me. You sure did better than me on my first try. Over all I think it is very nice.

chris ann

[purplelilyone]

Ok I started making some of the changes that I know I could do. WHat do you think.

[sislonski]

I viewed your website very quickly and it's very nice. YOu did a great job for having done it yourself.

I won't comment on any particulars, rather I'd like to make some other comments.

No matter how nice or wonderful your site is, it's not the only thing that will determine sales off of your website. There are many other factors involved also.
Such as:

Submitting your site to the search engines, which you've probably done

Optimizing your site by using keywords in your headers and metatags, which it looks like you've done.

Marketing your website, you can do this by either running a pay per click or google ad sense but these can prove to be expensive especially if you dont' know what you're doing or if they are not utulized properly.


You can also get local papers to run a story about your business (free advertisting) or take out an actual ad in the local paper, or magazines. Host an open house just before xmas, send out a flyer around your neigborhood with an open invitation, or have someone host a home party for you.

No matter how much you make in sales by doing any of the above, it will still get people visiting your site. A lot of visits can help with placement in the search engines.

Even though I may have made one initial sale I still have customers who continue to visit my site on a weekly basis. Just to see what's new. So try keep it fresh and updated and make constant changes.

I've had over 23000 hits in one day on my site, but my average is about 9000 a day. This month I'm already over 13000 and the month has just started, but thats normal for October for me. It's my biggest month for sales. Trust me when I say, those don't all generate into sales. So don't worry if you have received many sales with over 1000 hits to your site in two months.

You could have 100 people that decided to look at it from LE each day. Not all wanting to buy but admiring your work and wanted to see more. It doesn't take long for the numbers to add up when you have lookie-loos rather than buyers. So don't be too worried and don't be too paranoid as to how your site looks.

Make note of the advise offered by others and make the changes if you wish. But for sales to happen online you really need to start thinking about marketing your product and your website.

Even check out the book. Marketing for dummies. I bought one myself and use a lot of the tips suggested. Such as including a coupon on this months sales for Xmas orders. A great way to increase holiday sales.

Hope I've been of some help.

shari