Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi, my name is Lindsay and I started my own home-business named "Nonsensical Invitations". I design and sell custom designed invitations, announcements, cards, and posters.

I designed this website myself, and I'm worried that I have too much "stuff" on it. I want it to be simple, yet informational enough to get customers. Do I show too many sample designs, or is this a good thing?

Also, I've noticed many people get on my home page and then leave. How could I make them stay?? Also, what would be the best place to start to advertise my business?

Please help! I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!!

www.nonsensicalinvites.com

Hey Lindsay

First of all, you got a very decent website especially for a first timer doing it and in .net. That looks cool. Kudos to you.

But there are lot of things you need to improve,

First loading of the pages. Even with the high speed, it took me ever toload and it is because your images are not compressed properly. You need to compress you images and load them. It shouldn't spoil the image. That is the first thing I would.

Second, you got real good images but you need to organize them property and mix them up with the content and reduce the sizes and give them some effect to make it blend wit the text, not just as image. 

Third, collection you can use some album or lightbox type thing to show instead of displaying the pictures in the page. It will look good.

Finally, your blog and email ids should change and point to your own website. Since you are already paying for the website, you should be able to set up email from the hosting and also blog thru them.

Forgot, to make visitor a member, try to ask them signup for a prize or something to the member or mailing list and follow up with them to create a strong member base. 

Hope it helps. Let meknow if you need help.

Vijai

Thanks so much for the advice! I really like the idea of doing a lightbox slideshow, but I just can't figure it out! I'm using Microsoft Office Live's small business website online program, so I'm not sure if I even can put a lightbox on this kind of website?? Can you help me with this?

 

Thank you!

-Lindsay Wall

www.nonsensicalinvites.com

Hi Lindsay,

Real quick reply here - I'm about to get on a plane.

Here's a great article I think you should check out.  It may answer some of your questions about your website being too busy.

I'll continue my thoughts another time.  I hope you find the article helpful in the
meantime.

Take care,

Keith
www.provocativecopy.com

You will have limitations on what you can do by using Microsoft live, as well as other web site building programs.

There are a couple of things that you might consider about your site.

(1) Your title tage is the same as your domain name. This is a waste of the title tag because people searching on your domain name will find your site without having thoe words in your title tag. You should eplace your title tag words with targeted key words/phrase.

(2) Your keywords meta tag is way too long... although the keywords tag is not read by most major search engines anyway.

(3) A lot of your text content is not text but an image. This means that search engines can not "read" this text on your web site and so, those words will not appear in search results.

If you want to continue to your images to display text, then you should add alt image tags to those images. The alt image text should be the text you are displaying. Alternatively, you can just use text instead of an image.

 

~Roland

 

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