Pages: 1Website for Review
http://www.familytreefolk.co.uk
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Hi
We started this site in January to sell gifts and products with a genealogy/family history theme. We know there are thousands of people out there interested in genealogy. We get good sales at family history fairs where people see the products. Our problem is very low traffic to the website and virtually no sales.
We did have a flurry in May, but this has now died down - be as critical as you can - I am sure that something about the site is going wrong but honestly have no idea what it is. We are not expert web developers but we have tried using good key words, key phrases, put plenty of content (news pages etc) and a variety of products.
Please tell us where we are going wrong before we give up!!
Best wishes and thanks
Kathryn
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From: Colorado, USA
Registered: 2006-02-15
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OK from a visitors point of view so I will set aside the technical stuff.
I found the home page confusing. You have so much on it that I didn't know where I wanted or should go next. Suggest you reduce the content some or restructure it so that it will tell me where you want me to go next.
Once I leave the home page I there is no link to your contact page. This needs to be on every page as you never know when a visitor will decide to contact you. If they have to hunt for this information, they won't, they will leave.
The need to hit the back button or return to the gift index page to view a different category is a hassle.
Suggest you have the main categories in a drop-down menu from the Gifts link. This will let me see the categories and jump straight to the one that interests me.
On your gifts page rather than have a list of the categories, maybe some thumbnail images that link to the categories.
The listed items for each category should be consistent across the site.
When going to the category, again have some thumbnail images for each item with these images linking to a larger image of the item. I like the way you have the key rings page. Image on the left with the info on the right. Take the text you have at the bottom of the items and move it to the top above the items. This will let me know right away that you do have discounts for bulk ordering.
I would remove this line from your cards page.
It is very difficult to photograph or scan our cards to get across their quality and feel, so here are some facts about them.
In addition I would remove any other similar statement. Statements like this actually say more than we want them to.
There is more but I will stop here for now.
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It's a nice site Kathryn -- but, you have alot of coding issues...
You have a script running in the background which is annoying -- suggest you delete it.
Currently, you have a whopping 2,163 code warnings that should be fixed -- since you're using this <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> at the beginning of your code, all of your tag anchors need a space and backslash like this ... < /> ... if that's unclear, here's what I mean:
This "<img id="Frame14449" name="Frame14449" width="767" height="37" src="img_1164153790_11051_1164153790.gif" border=0>" needs to be shown like this...
<img id="Frame14449" name="Frame14449" width="767" height="37" src="img_1164153790_11051_1164153790.gif" border=0 /> ... see the space and trailing backslash?
This needs to be done on ALL of your images -- while you're fixing those, they also need an "alt" description ... those 2 steps will clear up over 90% of your code warnings.
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From: San Antonio, TX
Registered: 2006-08-07
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Sorry to correct you TA, but the closing slash is only necessary on XHTML documents, not HTML 4.01.
The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that there are elements of both types on the page. The DOCTYPE is HTML, but the <html> tag includes an XML namespace that's only useful in an XHTML document. The meta tags are set up with the closing slashes used in XHTML documents, but nothing else is. This makes me think the meta tags were generated elsewhere.
Here's what I suggest.
Change this line:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">
to this: <html>
remove the slashes (/) from the end of the meta tags and the link tag. You also have a couple of meta tags after the body tag; those should be before the </head> tag.
I wouldn't suggest adding the slashes in the img tags, but would suggest adding alt attributes to them. The alt attribute gives a text description to the images, and gives search engines something to help set up keywords. They should look something like alt="Description of the image".
Another problem accounting for quite a few errors is the ids on your <td> tags. Any id should only be used once on a page. Since I don't see the TElem id being used in your stylesheet, I suggest taking "id=TElem" out of every tag on the page.
HA Steven -- caught me again with too many windows open and just glancing ... must be the strong coffee... 
Hi again
From our stats I saw that quite a few people have taken the trouble to look at the site - which is great - and three people have put up some comments.
Thanks for the general points about the site from a visitor point of view - this is exactly what we need to know and work on.
The other two replies are good too but I have to admit they start to go beyond my knowledge. I have used some html language and did a simple website with css style sheets but really I am a complete amateur. The site has been built using software provided by our hosting service - its called Zen builder. I guess a lot of the coding issues are coming from how that works. I will have a look at the html codes and see if I can work something out and also will call the Irish company who do our hosting - they are really helpful and are willing to sort out issues with the software.
Is there anywhere on the web that gives a clear tutorial on this stuff without going too over the top re jargon?
Any more comments very welcome - keep em coming!
Best wishes
Kathryn:thumbsup:
Hi again
Just had a couple more thoughts and questions.
When you say we have coding issues and a code runs that is really annoying - what happens? I have downloaded firefox and netscape and looked at the site with them and it always looks OK to me. How is it looking to other computers and why is it different?
Is there a way we can test for these sorts of problems?
Best wishes and thanks
Kathryn
Administrator
From: Colorado, USA
Registered: 2006-02-15
Posts: 2176
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kathforhistory wrote:
Hi again
Just had a couple more thoughts and questions.
When you say we have coding issues and a code runs that is really annoying - what happens? I have downloaded firefox and netscape and looked at the site with them and it always looks OK to me. How is it looking to other computers and why is it different?
Is there a way we can test for these sorts of problems?
Best wishes and thanks
Kathryn
To view the code errors mentioned by TA you need to get the html tidy add-on for FireFox. Tidy
Having valid code gives you that bit of extra insurance that your site will display in all browsers the way you want it to. When you have a large number as you do now there is a greater possibility that a browser could get the code messed up.
You are using an image for spacing. I would guess a couple hundred times. Every time it is used it creates a code warning since it doesn't have an alt tag.
Also you are using the same id, id=TElem an id should only be used once per page. This creates another couple hundred code warnings.
I would also suggest you get the web developers toolbar for FF and look at your site with images disabled. ToolBar
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