Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

My website has been up for about three weeks now. I am not getting the traffic or sales I thought I would. Any suggestions? www.cutecribs.com

Three weeks is a short period even with active SEO and SE submissions. It could take a few months before you start seeing SE traffic.

From a brief look at your site, none of your pages have meta information (Bad). There`s a bunch of pictures in place of text on the left (Bad). Your pictures have no alt text. You also have minimal pictures supporting your content besides your site design (Bad). None of your pages seem to be designed for search engines. The page outline and division of pages don`t fit a distinct keyword/topic besides designs, order, and about us. Try making a few pages about your cribs rich with content so search engines can index you.

Your looking at a slow path to traffic if you don`t have an active SEO plan or website marketer working on your website. Definitely advertise your domain name off-line to compensate for the slow indexing of SE`s. It`s a great domain name! I think the domain name will definitely help the branding of your site and business.

You do have a page rank of 2 which seems odd if you say your website has only been up for three weeks. Your time line would fit with the last PR update but it makes more sense if it was up for awhile before that. I`d assume you`re getting little traffic, which makes it extremely hard to analyze your conversion rating.

After a quick froogle search on cribs, I was wondering if you researched your prices. Your cribs seem high in price without enough information to justify them. I can understand buying a high quality and high priced crib but your website leaves me wondering how you can charge so much. Give the visitor reasons. My suggestion is instead of having a single page about every crib with a tiny few sentences, make individual pages for each crib with a main page listing them all with that short description.

Despite your SEO issues, your overall appearance looks on-par with any other small business site in your industry. I`m not your target audience but I think it would look good to them. Just be careful about using the pictures in-place of text.

Regards



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Colin Winter
Small Business Website Management and Marketing

Thanks. That gives me some idea of where to start with some changes. I did do alot of comparison research most hand painted cribs go for about $1800.00 to $2500.00. I guess I need to justify the pricing. I am not much with the lingo for websites (I paid someone to do the layout but now I am on my own) but any more suggestions I would greatly appreciated.

Your code also has no doctype, and several validation errors.

The small black text on the left is almost too small to read, and you have too many different fonts on your page.

3 weeks is not much time to achieve traffic, as was stated, unless you are doing a lot of advertising. Build inbound links, submit to niche/related directories, etc., to help increase traffic.


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M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

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Jimmy Anderson
President/CEO - XpressPrint
XpressPrint: Your source for full-color printing.

Thanks Jimmy,

That is exactly the feedback I need. I was not to sure about the content when I wrote it, and as I said I know nothing about websites or spiders and such. Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated.

First of all, That is not true... Aside from all the coding errors, once they are fixed and the Keywords, Description and content is added to the web site, the web site can start ranking within 32 to 48 hours. There are a few things that need to be added but over all the web site has potential.
My suggestions would be to have all the errors fixed and submit the web site to all search engines. Another suggestion would be to add a sitemap and a robot.txt file to the web site.
As for the price on the cribs.. I am assuming that you do not have any children of your own, but when you`re a parent to be the price is the last thing you look at... I paid $2,700.00 for my first child`s crib. Ask me if I`d do it all over again... Yes

Best Regards,



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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

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

Putting in my two cents, I found it very difficult to read your site. First, the bizarre transition going on in the main picture constantly distracted me from anything else. Secondly, the text size and background colors made it difficult.

What so many people still don`t seem to understand is that in today`s online shopping world, there`s no door to go through, no floor to walk, no space to exist within, no nothing....except a click and a screen. If a possible customer can`t get the idea of your site within seconds, why bother?

It`s not like they drove a long way or have been out shopping nearby and need a break. They might find the site, read something that gets them to click, but if they can`t *comfortably* move around your site, a click away is just as simple.

Supposing someone did find your site via Google: there`s really no description in that results listing of 25 words that would get them to choose your site, right?

You`ve got a cool product, but it`s just not being presented well, in my opinion. Who`s your target market? Parents-to-be, shopping for nursery furnishings. And yet...there doesn`t seem to be the word "nursery" anywhere on the main page. Nor did I find: "expecting" "mom" or "deliver" (as in delivery date approaching).