chkntree Posted July 3, 2006 Posted July 3, 2006 Hi, i'm looking for honest feedback on the overall impression and ease of use for my store. Any suggestions and comments would be appreciated! I'm a stay at home mom opening a childrens boutique and I am totally new at this stuff! www.chickentreeboutique.com
bennysheehan Posted July 4, 2006 Posted July 4, 2006 Yes the loading time was a little bit slow, but worth the wait. I think it is a lovely design, very personalised. Having your name and a photo of yourself would reassure me as a buyer of your legitimacy as a seller, but I still think you should make a telephone number and maybe even a physical address more prominent - as I couldnt find this info... Overall - well done.
Guest Posted July 4, 2006 Posted July 4, 2006 Cute site - great potential! I am on dialup... took 40 seconds before ANYTHING would load on the page. And a complete 3 minutes before the full page would load. You definately need to reduce file size of all graphics. There are contributions for this I believe. Your site is not centered. Try the Fixed Width contribution. It's super simple to set up - just add a small bit of code to the stylesheet and two tiny codes to header and footer. Ditch the customer/visitor count at the bottom - visitors don't care and you have webmaster programs for that behind the scenes. hehehe love the "contact technology" pic on the contact us page. Where's your physical address, phone number, email addys, hours of operations? Excellent About Us page. Cudos. Love your logo/site banner. Makes for great branding. Got to Swaddling Blankets - why is there $0.01 crossed out and $10.00 in red? There's also no picture for this product. Color option doesn't have colors but "16mb"? Overall, great site - just need it to load faster and make sure all the products are completely filled in: attributes, pics, etc. Great job!
Andrew Yuen Posted July 4, 2006 Posted July 4, 2006 Way to slow on DSL, I agree with everyone took forever to load the page. Other then that, excellent logo and overall design/ use of colors. Andrew Yuen osCommerce, Community Team
Guest Posted July 4, 2006 Posted July 4, 2006 I love the design and all. Very unique. My only thing is I'm on High Speed Cable and took 10 secs to load, running kinda slow. I would suggest doing something with your pictures it could just be the background image with a few other things. Overall Very nice site. Do you make your own items?
chkntree Posted July 4, 2006 Author Posted July 4, 2006 I do make all my own stuff. Thanks for all the feedback. I have been concerned about the loading time and it is something I plan to look into. Do you know the names of the above mentioned contributions?
abra123cadabra Posted July 5, 2006 Posted July 5, 2006 Overall I like the site but there are still areas you can work on to improve the shopping experience for the customer. You'll realise work on osC never stops. I agree about the load times. You can try imagemagic. Easy to install and stores every image first time it's requested in the server cache. After that it's only generated new when a different size is required or the original changed. There are other contributions that create the thumbnails on the fly without storing them. Not too sure about the dotty background. You could certainly move the shop up and center it. It's always good to show as much as you can above the fold (without scrolling down). We all know, first impressions count. You have a great start with your about us page but you certainly need to put a physical business address on the page. I have no knowledge about taxes in US but from other posts I would assume you need to pay sales tax when you live in the county of the shop or something like that. You state that you offer free shipping and flat rate shipping outside US and Canada. That's cool. I just had a look into shipping rates to send a 1 kg packet from Ireland to UK. It costs a wooping 7 Euro without any tracking. Maybe recheck that generous offer? I like your photos and the logo. I'm not a fan of too much pink or pastel but that's me. Gives me the impression of baby boutique. abra The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product. Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome. Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.
chkntree Posted July 5, 2006 Author Posted July 5, 2006 Loaded much faster today did you do something to it? For some reason i had GZip compression disabled so that was changed and I changed the size of the pic on the first page. Thank you for checking it again.
mwstinson Posted July 6, 2006 Posted July 6, 2006 For some reason i had GZip compression disabled so that was changed and I changed the size of the pic on the first page. Thank you for checking it again. I really like it! First site I have ever seen that makes pastels look good! Congratz. Also I didnt experience any slow loads............... but I am on a screamin fast link. I thought this stuff was gonna be easy!! BACK IT UP BEFORE YOU JACK IT UP!!!!
Guest Posted July 7, 2006 Posted July 7, 2006 wooohoo! Down to 10 seconds before anything would begin to load and a complete 1 min and 20 seconds for the whole page to load! You can scoot the shop up just a little bit more...... Still one of my favorite sites here!
skylla Posted July 11, 2006 Posted July 11, 2006 Colour scheme is very nice indeed! Something strange happens in Firefox, I run v1.5.0.4 on XP: I am not able to select and enter/type anything in - the contact_us box - tell a friend box - change qty of products in the shopping cart. Looked closer into your code and I see that this is a side effect from using a javascript to disable right clicks, probably to "prevent" people from downloading your pictures. Not good...
chkntree Posted July 12, 2006 Author Posted July 12, 2006 Colour scheme is very nice indeed! Something strange happens in Firefox, I run v1.5.0.4 on XP: I am not able to select and enter/type anything in - the contact_us box - tell a friend box - change qty of products in the shopping cart. Looked closer into your code and I see that this is a side effect from using a javascript to disable right clicks, probably to "prevent" people from downloading your pictures. Not good... Hmmm!!! I thought I fixed that problem...would you mind checking back in a week or so to see if that is still a problem?
my scrap shop G Posted July 14, 2006 Posted July 14, 2006 omg, LOVE it!! something for me to aspire to. one thing, the picture of the girls handbag on the chair... I love the way you've taken all your photos with the rustic backgrounds, (chair, fence, etc) but in those pics the chair is the photo with just the tiny bag at the back, bit tricky to see it and appreciate it. (I live in an old timber home and I quite like that chair!!!!, would go nicely... but you should want me to want the bag!) :)
skylla Posted July 14, 2006 Posted July 14, 2006 It's good to be back, still a very nice site... Hmmm!!! I thought I fixed that problem...would you mind checking back in a week or so to see if that is still a problem? You've deleted the js and it worked a treat! You've done very well and all further comments should therefore be considered 'picky'. ** The site works magic re. format colour and layout, it now makes the button_quick_find.gif looks a bit tatty. ** Personally, I would get rid of the visitor stat and todays date. As Mies would say, less is more (just like to say this now and than) ** Your 'continue shopping' and 'checkout' "button" are different from others (ie link <-> button) Could I ask, are you both site owner and developer?
chkntree Posted July 17, 2006 Author Posted July 17, 2006 It's good to be back, still a very nice site...You've deleted the js and it worked a treat! You've done very well and all further comments should therefore be considered 'picky'. ** The site works magic re. format colour and layout, it now makes the button_quick_find.gif looks a bit tatty. ** Personally, I would get rid of the visitor stat and todays date. As Mies would say, less is more (just like to say this now and than) ** Your 'continue shopping' and 'checkout' "button" are different from others (ie link <-> button) Could I ask, are you both site owner and developer? i am the site owner, as for the developing, i have a friend who hosts and loaded the basic oscommerce program for me and I have taken it mostly from there....he helped when I was in tough spots but didn't have the time to do the whole thing for me so I gave it a go. I've learned so much! It has been fun and if my store doesn't make it I can always look into doing something like web site developing in the future! Thanks for checking back!
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