Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

My website is about selling bumper stickers and t shirt transfers. I designed it using templates from Shopsite. I am looking for advice on whether or not it looks professional enough to market and grab the attention of buyers. I am an amateur and I do not know much about HTML. I am also looking for advice about the way I have the E commerce set up as far as how the shopping cart will perform when accessed. To me, I think it needs a lot of work to look professional but I am at a loss right now on what else to do and that is why I am asking for help from the pro's on this. The text editor is not giving me the option to insert a hyperlink but the URL is http://tedsbumperstickers.com

Thanks in advance to anyone that may respond. I would appreciate any feedback.

                                                                                                    Ted

 

 

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Ted,

  I like the idea for an easily manageable home business. I have a few suggestions that I think could help your business... hope this helps.

I think the site could be improved immediately with a smoother color scheme. Try kuler.adobe.com for ideas on matching colors. I haven't used shopsite, but you might want to try Wordpress with one of their ecommerce plugins. This is a good solution for someone with a simple store and limited coding experience, because you can download templates, and modify the basics pretty easily.

The menu items on the sidebar are unnecessary, since they are already listed on the top. Why not have something like specials, bestsellers, etc. there instead?

I think you have too many products. Maybe host a support group with some friends and narrow down to the best 10-20 in each category. Eventually you can drop the ones that aren't selling, and occasionally add new products, which gives a good reason to make a facebook post and drive traffic to your business.

Coming up with a creative name and logo would also help legitimize your business. For example, your homepage welcome says "Get the word out....". Something like that (getthewordout.com), is more catchy that "tedsbumperstickers.com". Also, the shorter the name the better. So if you can come up with a creative, short url, blam!. You can get logos designed on 99designs.com for not too much.

... these are my opinions, hope they can add some value and brainstorming.

 

 

Hello,

 

First thing that I saw when I came to the site what the blue logo on the red background. You either need to get a logo made or choose a soft color like the tan you used where the (home [view cart]) is located.

Second instead of having the fist page of all the information about the product, I would list the most popular items on the home page. Then move that content to a about us page or why us page. Then you can have like a cool banner that says, "why people choose us" on the home page. No one wants to visit a web site and out of the bat start reading. They want to dig into the fun stuff like the bumper stickers.

Organize the heading navigation to match the order of the navigationon the side. It may not be a big deal but all the little things make the differance.

I do not want to throw to much out there but the last thing light mentioned above is changing the colors to something more soft and matching. Like earthmind said kuler.adobe.com is a great website to match colors.

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Thanks to Earthmind and Mattewbb for the feedback.

I worked on it some more tonight as I was taking advice from the both of you and combined both of your ideas. I hope it looks better to you guys as it does to me but Im sure it could be better. Im just not a web designer. Thanks again for your input.

                                                                 Ted

http://tedsbumperstickers.com

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