Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I`m brand new to this kind of thing. I built the whole site myself using Yahoo Sitebuilder. I really love my store and have many ideas. I opened around April and have had only one sale. I registered with all the free search engine registrations and am currently paying for Yahoo`s cost per click program. I have tried to optimize the use of keywords. I think my site might be kind of "primitive" but I don`t have money to pay people to make it look great. I don`t mind doing the time consuming work of taking advantage of any free advertising stuff out there like banners, linking to other sites like mine, keywords and stuff like that. Please let me know what you think, good and bad. I would really appreciate it. I have wrote more about my site in my profile. www.thriftstoretreasures.net

A couple of quick points, although there are more...

The fonts on the home page are HUGE... I`m on a 1024 x 768 resolution setting (probably same as you) , these are bigger than needed.

On an 800x600 (web standard) screen, one has to slide across to see the full page, roughly half the people on the web still use this resolution and one should not need to slide over to see the rest of the page--this certainly says amateur site.

Pages are taking too long to load--I assume this is one of those carts where you use the same picture for the thumbnail as the main image which always slows everything down to a crawl (we won`t even imagine what this does on dialup), especially if the pictures have not been resized. You`ve got to make those main pictures smaller--no more than 600 pixels across, which is more than enough, this will help a little with the speed issue.

As to marketing... use eBay as many do, to get a jumpstart getting people to their sites by having auctions out there. Ebay listings typically show up well in search engines, so it helps if someone is looking for an item what you offer. You may or may not take a loss on some of the auctions, but if it gets people to your site, consider it as a marketing investment.

Search for directories, many of which allow you to list your site for free or minimal cost, that are targets toward your type of products. Perhaps decorating sites (for "finds"), or whatever else you find where your site fits.

Get listed in Froogle (a lot of shopping carts have a Froogle export option--use it), that will help get your site into more places. There are other shopping sites like bizrate.com where your money might be better spent than pay-per-click at this stage... take a look around see what fits your budget, but keep your eyes open for any quality site where you can get your site listed. And if you have friends who have websites, see if they would consider exchanging links.

Google puts all new sites in the "Google sandbox" for 9 months to a year so you won`t see much there, so concentrate your efforts on making your site better while you research places to list it. And keep on looking for those listing opportunities, but make sure they are quality sites (not the kind with lots of popups and the stuff that just about everyone hates) before you list your site, or it could cause you to be banned from some search engines.

There`s lots you can do to get things moving, but you have to be looking for those opportunities, and I woud suggest looking at some of the marketing sites out there for some good (free) info as well. Get all the education you can get, it won`t be wasted.

Hi thriftstorejunkie

Do you continuously promote your site in free online classified sites?

Have you considered a membership/loyalty type program with special offers/cashback for members? Your margins may already be too thin though?

Cheers

Advantagenetwork

-------------------------

Imall: www.advantagenetwork.com.au, Business Services and Finance: www.scbusiness.com.au, Retail Finance: www.standardcapital.com.au

I love your color choice!

-------------------------

Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

EBay doesn`t allow Google to crawl their regular auctions, generally. It used to be only the eBay stores, but I`m hearing even that`s not true lately. I may be wrong.

The two things that bothered me on this site were the picture load time, and the blank table cells. I`m running DSL an when I clicked any menu item, had to wait as the pictures of each item rolled down, top to bottom. Like Pat, I`m thinking the originals (hosted where?) are really big.

I`d get something like Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP if you haven`t any money at all (GIMP is open source, free), and use it to resize the images. Another option is IrfanView, also free, which doesn`t give much control over image editing, but it`s a lot easier to learn than a graphics program and will allow image resizing.

As for the blank cells...why are they there? It`s as if I`m looking at a "To Do" list, and there`s blank space in case I come up with something to do later. I`d just soon see only what`s for sale right now, and not the available space for later items, if that`s possible on the template.

The idea is good, particularly with the "orders and requests." Personally, I`d like to see kitchen gadgets, but that`s because I`m always looking in thrift stores for stuff I can`t ordinarily afford. I checked under "home decor," but that`s for what it says...decorative items.

Thanks to all for giving me advice. It`s very helpful. CRAIG...when did you look at my site? Ever since Pat wrote I have been working on resizing my pics. I published the new sized pictures Weds night at about 8pm EST. I made them all 600 pixels. Quality is low. I wondered if they are loading any faster. I`m using Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 for all the work I do with the pictures.

Thanks again, all the feedback is very helpful.

I looked at it late last night, then again just now (5pm CDT, 9/28). It took about 5 seconds for the home page to load. I`m using Firefox, Win98SE, and a DSL line.

I clicked "Home Decor" and again had about a 10sec delay. The images rolled downward, one by one, slowly, but took no more than about 10 seconds for the page to finally load. Then I saw the empty cell lines still.

Although I agree with Pat that the images should be no more than 640x480, that`s still a very large image. I`ve found that for eBay ads, 350px high or wide is very good, easy to see, and loads quickly. But for a thumbnail, I`d hold to less than 150px.

That means the largest "edge" should hold to 350px, maximum 400px. The image I looked at is 600px wide by 352px high. If you resize with "lock aspect ratio" constrained, then whatever is the largest (height or width), set that to 350-400px. The other will adjust properly.

Another thing would be the resolution of the images. I see this one was 72ppi, and 39KB, which isn`t all that big. It may be that Yahoo! is holding back on their outbound information. Pat would know better about that, but I do know that hosts can choose how fast they`ll transfer outbound information. Having just had a major (bad) issue with Yahoo!, I`l never again recommend them for anything. I don`t now, but Pat probably would, how to check the transfer speed coming from a host.

The other option is to have two different images, one very small for fast loading on the thumbnail page, the other larger for viewing under "click to enlarge." Otherwise, the browser has to resize the image downward, based on the tag specifications. It looks like you`re already doing this, so again, it`s starting to seem as if Yahoo! is just sending their data very slowly.

I`m not saying that 10 seconds is impossible, anymore than I`d say a microwave is crucial to own. Before MWOs a hotdog took 10 minutes to cook (was gonna say "load!" LOL!) But...AFTER we had microwave ovens, knowing we could make a hotdog in seconds, people naturally began to complain if it took more than a minute.

Same with popcorn. The rule of thumb is that when you give people a new technology, they rapidly take it for granted, then forget what "used to be" the norm, long, long ago. 10 seconds on a Web page is noticeably long, in my opinion. Then, considering I`m using DSL and half the population is still on 28K dial-up, I can interpret the added delay on a dial-up as being very annoying.

The site itself is good, interesting, useful, and fun to navigate. But as the old folks used to say, "anything worth doing is worth doing right." We all of us choose whether what we`re doing is going to be "good enough," or "exceptional." It`s our choice as to what level of quality we want to make our baseline.