Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello all,

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Rushabh Sheth
Cascade Star - Indulge in Style™
Specialty Diamond Designer Jewelry at Perfect Value.
http://www.cascadestar.com

Right now the problem I see with the site is that it does nothing to differentiate from the bazillion other jewelry sites online.

What`s your "unique selling proposition" (USP, or unique selling point)? What can I or any other viewer (or searcher) use to store your company in mind?

For example, when you think of Disneyland, you think of Mickey Mouse or perhaps the Sleeping Beauty castle. There`s a single image that immediately calls up everything else. That`s how our minds work---we experience life, consolidate it into images, then store those images (along with other sensory data).

To recall something, as with finding your company and thinking about it later, you`ll need some sort of "branding" image. You don`t have one.

Craig,

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Rushabh Sheth
Cascade Star - Indulge in Style™
Specialty Diamond Designer Jewelry at Perfect Value.
http://www.cascadestar.com

Okay, I can see that. However, there isn`t anything at the moment that speaks out about that high-end luxury jewelry. I get the idea of having an art-gallery-type thing in real life, but online, it`s going to be different.

One option would be to hire a seriously professional product photographer, who not only does basic pictures, but can introduce some art-level quality to your images. The all-white background might be changed to then better show off your jewelry.

Bottom line, although you`ve explained it here on the forum, the site itself seems to me to fall short of that explanation. Make sense?

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Rushabh Sheth
Cascade Star - Indulge in Style™
Specialty Diamond Designer Jewelry at Perfect Value.
http://www.cascadestar.com

A couple things I would do:

- For the product listing use pagination instead of the iframe / frame you are using. I think it *could* be confusing to some.
- I would personally change the layout of product list page so that you don`t have a huge picture on the left side. I would make the list itself the main focus and put the large image on the product description page itself. I would make it so that if a user mouses over the smaller product image a larger one is displayed (so they don`t have to load the product page just to see the larger image).
- The products seem to blend together to me so I would alter the color of each "row" or at a minimum put a border on the bottom to draw a distinct line between products.
- Pad the small images so when the black border shows (onmouseover) it doesn`t shift everything.
- Because your images are larger and they don`t display until the ajax request is complete sometimes they don`t show immediately and sometimes not at all (Firefox 2.0.0.11). I would lose the ajax period and use macromedia`s mouseover code to preload the images (provided you switch to pagination and only load a couple products per page).

It looks like a custom cart in java and if this is the case I`m curious why you went that route instead of using an off the shelf product.

Either way the products look great and the site is generally pleasing to the eye.

I just noticed the cart isn`t working properly. If I change the quantity the drop down menu is correct but the text above says:

"Your cart contains [1] item(s)"

Even though the cart has 5 items. Worse yet if I hit "Continue to Checkout" I get the following:

"Please select at least one item to check out."

I`m not a professional jewelry photographer, and indeed, the pictures are very sharp and clear. But they`re boring, I think. I understand that you`re trying to capture the bridal feel of a magazine, but in a printed page within a magazine, you have all the many other pages to lend interest. On a Web site, where every page is the same, it would be a catalog, not a magazine.

My thinking is that a professional artist, using the original images and then adjusting backgrounds, can help increase the "eye-candy" interest in each image. Then, changing the page backgrounds from page to page (or category, etc.), would help some more.

I took your main image and just added some background---any background---to help demonstrate the idea:
(ring picture)

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