Thread: New Darwin Computer Store

Hi everybody,

I am currently making website for General Scientific, a local computer company in DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY. Our goal with the website is to provide some better prices for the Darwin public, compared to standard in-store retail pricing (as everyone knows, Darwin is very expensive)

General Scientific

I am NOT a website design/dev and therefore the website I am making probably looks crap etc etc.

I want some opinions and suggestions to improve!

Please note that the current product items are just a representative selection to assist in testing functionality such as the shopping cart. I may remove some of the products currently displayed and I sure as heck will add more!
So please don't reply immediately saying "oh you should put up XX product cos it kicks ass"

Is there anyone out there with CSS skills that could assist (for free of course) how to make some improvements?

Obviously the prices advertised cannot be as cheap as our down-south competitor as there simply isn't the turnover in Darwin to allow the smaller profit margin! That is where we need YOUR HELP! The more we sell, the lower profit margin we can survive on!

So please, check it out, make suggestions (but NOT product suggestions as yet) and spread the word! The more we sell the cheaper we can become!



P.S: We also have a shop in the Clock Tower Village (10/1 Caryota Court, Coconut Grove) and we do computer repairs!!!

bits and bytes lives.

almost, crimson....

it is me, but i am working for another company! good company though! (of course i would say that)

"I want some opinions and suggestions to improve! "

1) Scroll text on the bottom right hand side is very distracting, and completly pointless remove it. Imagin your dad with one eye trying to preciesly click on Add to chart!
2) Your front page tells me where the f**** you are in the NT via google maps +1
3) Your front page has red text = fail (Nothern Territory)
4) Place your pre-built system on the front page, this is generally where most of your click traffic will come from, and sales.
5) For advanced users your Itemised list on the bottom left hand corner loads very slowly, and just suddenly appears (Chrome browser here)
6) Advanced users will be use to your left hand itemized list, average users will find it frustrating (they like pictures and whats a FDD HDD?)
7) From personal preference if I had to order from your web site I would order a pre-built system then love to have the option to customize it on the way out. Then when placing the order, somebody ring up over the mobile phone to confirm the order or make recommendations.

Thanks chad, exactly the sort of response I was after!

Thanks for the +1 on the google map
I have removed the red text
I have removed the "product scroller" from bottom right corner

I haven't designed any prebuilt systems to advertise yet.. but when I do, I'll put them on the front page thankyou

If I put pictures for the categories, I can then have the categories list (with pictures) display on the main page of the Online Shop... as well as having the menu on the bottom left... I will work on this now...

The speed of the Categories list is quite slow, I know. I am hosting this website myself and once it is using some traffic and/or cpu load, I will have to move it to a hosting farm or get a fatter pipe (and bigger processor)



edit: I am also working on the overlapping text and the fact the product names just cut-off mid-name... that is a problem of importing a csv price list and the import will only take X characters per field I am working on this too.. I probably need some CSS experience to fix the overlapping text (if you click into a product, to go to it's page, the name of the product will display with the words slightly overlapping)

nothing on the front page immediately points out you guys do computer shit. Your business name doesn't imply it and all the large headings do is repeat what we already know "wtf is general scientific?" Your bulleted list is helpful, but the fact you sell and support PCs needs to be made more obvious. especially list some of this info in your page title (the bit inside the <.title><./title> tags) as this shows up in your 2 seconds of fame slot in google results.

currently your google results would probably look something like this for your homepage:

GENERAL SCIENTIFIC
Welcome to General Scientific!
Coconut Grove, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
General Scientific


users shouldn't have to scroll on the front page unless it's REALLY interesting. subscribing to the Rec school of banner design is a good way to throw away useful screen real-estate

random images of stuff that can loosely be called computers - not good - certainly not worth scrolling past the map for.

contact info on every page is good.

Much nicer can now focus on the content not the scolling text + pictures.

In regards to your Categories

Barebone Systems picture should be a monitor + mouse + keyboard (Nothing major, just a typical cut down system).

I like your side menu now that its stopped scrolling. Maybe per customer replace this with what other customers purchased. For example with Amazon "Customers who purchased (Insert Product) also purchased". Or in your case for profit, list the ones on the right hand side that you have special bundle deals with, though I will leave this up to you to decide.

Check that your cache policy for each web page will expire with ISP's Caches. I forgot the HTML tag that you can specify the lifetime for a web page before the ISP's Cache server will re-fetch the next update. Normaly they're designed for static HTML pages not php pages. Just something to look into.

Replace your search for Google Search instead. I know that you may be tempted to stay with php search functionality, though you're not a search engine, and your web site is going to get index by google anyway so dont fight it. Next sign up to Google Analytics | Official Website for web pages, this will tell you the click events coming into and out of your web page. If you have to pay for money for this do it, because its the best bucks you will every spend.

Remove Quantity from your orders, let the customer add more items or more qty items on checkout. It just clutters the interface.

Read up on barriers to enter, try to design the web page so registering is not first priority nor is it a priority to order items. When you have a new customer, just use their email address and generate a password based on the Order number so they can track their order. Offer some incentive to them to register on your web site and you will find people are very happy to do that.

Thats all I have to say.

More excellent suggestions! Thanks!

I'll take all suggestions on-board. I have already implemented a couple (random slideshow removed from front page)

@chad:
A barebone system does not include a keyboard, mouse or monitor... it includes a case, power supply, mainboard and in some cases a card-reader... but I can understand your point, it looks too much like another category for "cases"

@aegis:
I don't think I can edit the <title> tag so easily, it is dynamic PHP, I had a look in the index.php and it just grabs stuff from the database, I'll have to work out where to change that

BUT, it's almost home time now.. saved by the bell and all that... tomorrow...



edit: I found the <title> tag settings... very easy actually even for a noob like me.. thanks aegis

@Crusher
No problem regarding barebone system, it was my original assumption when reading barebone that it meant a cut down PC with not thrills. Maybe an open case with everything in it would be a better repsentation instead of a case?

I don't think I can use google search very well, as the online shop component of the website doesn't generate "search engine friendly" urls.... if I turn on the plugin that makes them SEF urls, the entire online shop crawls to a halt (15-45 seconds BEFORE each page starts to load)... I am trying to troubleshoot why the SEF links make it so slow, probably will need to upgrade the server with more memory

Currently using Ubuntu 9.10 32bit running with 1GB of memory woot