Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

http://www.pugetsystems.com

I`ve been reading here at SUN for quite a while, but haven`t gotten around to registering and being a contributing member until just now!

I`m the owner of a custom computer shop in Seattle.  We`re an online company, so our website is everything!  Most of our exposure is from SEO, search for "custom computers" or "gaming computers" and you`ll find us at or near the top.  We have nearly a hundred phrases and terms we`re optimizing for, but those are the biggest and most accurately describe our niche.  We build performance, quality machines.  Our target market is the enthusiasts who know enough about hardware to know that quality is important, so that allows us to be a little more technical with our audience. 

Our custom configuration pages (like http://www.pugetsystems.com/configure.php) get a lot of praise in their usability, so we`re confident we`ve accomplished a good tool there.  Our simpler configure pages (like http://www.pugetsystems.com/certified_sys.php?sys_id=15) are designed more for people that don`t know as much about hardware.  Being newer, we don`t have as much feedback about them.

I do virtually all our web design and copy writing (just one of the many job descriptions of this small business owner!).  We have developed our website pretty much entirely from scratch (with the exceptions of a few things such as our forums).  Our website represents years of learning and work.  That`s not to say I`ll be hurt by the many suggestions I hope to get!  I just mean that this isn`t a website I built last week and haven`t given good thought :)

As time went on over the last 6 years, the website became more and more complex.  More additions, features, ad copy...it got to be huge, and frankly poorly maintained.  We decided to focus on simplicity, to remove all the parts of our site that were not as relevant or were prone to being poorly maintained, and remove them.  We wanted a site relevant to our niche, but still providing good information.  I *thought* what we came up with was a great step in the right direction.  Not perfect of course, but that`s no reason not to take that step!

What`s the problem?  We`ve seen a drop off in sales, which started pretty much the day we went live with the new design, at the end of February.  It has me truly baffled.  I wish there was an archive of the old website I could show.  The overall look hasn`t changed, it is more about the navigation.  One of the biggest changes is that the newer, simplified configure pages are much more prominent. 

So, this is a great time for some criticism!  Perhaps I`m in too deep to have good perspective, and that`s exactly where people here can help.  I look forward to your comments.

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Jon Bach - President | Puget Custom Computers | www.pugetsystems.com

You can see your historical site (at least the home page) here, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pugetsystems.com.

Jon,

Your situation is a good lesson for all people who have a website. It is very important to understand your web traffic, your target market, track the sources of traffic, and what customers purchase.

When changing a site especially one that is search engine dependent, it is important to understand the relationship of your content to your search engine produced traffic.

Has your site`s traffic/hits also gone down or just purchases?

Improving a website is a good goal...and is essentially a continual process. Before lopping off webpages or making large changes first see if people and searches "use" those pages and content.

Do you have repeat customers or are your sales generated from mostly new customers?  If you maintain a customer database... email them and ask them for feedback on your site.

~Roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

JonBach - Are the majority of your current customers serious gamers and computer whizzes (sp?) or are they average computer users? If your sales dropped after you began featuring the simplified order page more prominently then I would assume that your customer base consists of serious computer users.  Take a good look at your customer purchase history, who is buying from you? I did like your site and thought that it was easy to navigate, however, I would like to see the `Featured Products` on the center of the page and not off to the right. The home page is a great source of information but It may have to much of a focus on this information and not enough on product. I do like the idea of what you are doing with the articles, and they appear to be current and relevant but I don`t think that they should be the focus of your home page. One other thought...are you sure the slump correlates with  the change of website design or perhaps it correlates with the after Christmas slowdown? Check your sales history to be sure, you don`t want to change a good thing for the wrong reasons!

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Sharon Murphy
Owner
Northwoods State of Mind, Inc.
NorthWoods

Just a clarification on this:  the last archive is over a year old, which does not represent the website as it was before the recent redesign.  However, it does show the difference in simplification, on a concept level.

Thanks for the great first replies, I`ll respond in detail tomorrow!

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Jon Bach - President | Puget Custom Computers | www.pugetsystems.com

The site is very nice.... the system seems very similar to Dell`s system so is a proven system.

The one thing that screams out.... there is no buy button!!! I get to the end and can tell my friends about the $15,000 PC I have designed, post it to a forum, save it but not actually buy it. Also, after adding up a price why do I get to set a budget at the end? Is it to mean the price is negotiable rather than fixed?

2 bugbears... I normally run my laptop with javascript turned off - your site wont work. The site opens far too many windows... by the end of it I think I ended up with 5 different windows with more than 1 having a partially configured PC.

Certainly here in the UK the PC market is exceptionally price sensitive. Looking at your site my gut reaction is that your prices are high. For example in the uk there is about £40 ($75) price difference between the E6600 and E6400 processor and given we are in rip off britain I would have expected the price difference to be less in America but you charge an extra $135


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Astaroth Solutions - Bespoke web development

Wow, I looked at the archived site, then at the new site, and I can see maybe why the traffic dropped off.

I tend to be a general customer, with some understanding of technology. But the technology isn`t what it`s "all about." I don`t care. I want something I can use, and want to buy it when I see it.

The old site was really straightforward: Here`s a computer, here`s what it does, here`s how much it costs, click here to buy it. You keep saying the new site "simplifies" things. How? The old site was about as simple as I can imagine.

Here`s the computer, here are the specs, buy it or don`t. :-) Why was that hard?

The new site is like any other computer or technology site I`ve seen. There`s no differentiation, there`s a lot of text, a lot of mental effort, and it doesn`t really get me interested. Not like the first site.

I`m curious at the exact reason that drove the conversion---the change to the new site format? There must have been one or two highly specific problems that arose, where a new site would solve them. Right?

Roland, thanks for the comments.  I absolutely agree that designing and changing a website needs to be done with careful consideration and study of your users.  I don`t want to come across as if we didn`t do that, but I think I may have.  The changes we made to our website were done after 6 months of usability studies, traffic analysis, and discussion internally.

Our traffic has remained the same.  The move was done with very careful consideration to SEO and our rankings.  Our page views have reduced, but that is expected since the number of pages is reduced.  Most of our customers are new.  We do have repeat customers, but a computer isn`t a very frequent purchase, so as a younger company we`re still growing our base.

One of the basics of website usability is that people need to be able to skim your website, and know what`s going on.  Through usability studies of our own, we confirmed that people do not read...they skim and the first thing that looks like what they want, the click!  So we really tried to make our website the type that can be navigated without thinking, but still provided good content when you got down to the deep pages.

What I am wondering now is whether we oversimplified.  There`s a difference between making content skimmable, and removing content.  I wonder whether we have removed too much content on the high level pages.  It is still there, but you have to get to it in the deeper pages.

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Jon Bach - President | Puget Custom Computers | www.pugetsystems.com

Great comments!  Most of our users are whizzes.  It is entirely possible that the market we cater to *wants* that verbose text, and that this is a case where we hurt ourselves following principles of design that normally apply, but not so clearly to us.  Now, our usability studies did show a tendency to skim...but you can argue that it was not a good sample.  After all, those were people getting $50 and lunch.  Our real users are spending $6000....I`d read harder too!

I have confirmed this is not a normal yearly slowdown, but we only have 7 years of history, so it is tough to say with certainty.

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Jon Bach - President | Puget Custom Computers | www.pugetsystems.com