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Opinion: Epoxy Source & Information
Paul,
There is no conflict between the three design criteria you list below. Good navigation helps in all three areas. First off, it make the site easy to navigate, so your customers - who should be your first priority - can find what they need quickly and make purchases easily. You can have the best SEO on the Web and you will still lose business if your customers get frustrated with your site and leave without buying anything. That is definitely your current situation. Good navigation allows search engine "spiders" to easily crawl and index your site. It benefits your SEO. It also makes it easier for customers who come to your site from search engines to find what they need. If your site is properly organized and pages are based on consistent templates, your legal requirements are easily met and will be implemented completely and consistently. Right now, your site is not optimum in any of these areas. Your current site "design" is hurting your business. You may be generating a good income, which is great, but you could be doing even better. You are literally throwing away business right now. You can rationalize this away if you choose to, but does that really make any sense? The consensus here is obvious and it's not just from web designers, but from prospective customers. "Shooting the messenger" in a case like this is pretty short-sighted; people who work in the Web industry and/or design sites for a living know what they're talking about, especially when it comes to the basics, which is what your site is really lacking. It's not a matter of making a site that's visually stunning, it's a matter of improving the most basic functionality. Bottom line: fix your site and watch your business grow. Paul Oman wrote: I'm sure lots of folks are finding this interesting reading and learning about the ins and outs of website based businesses. To sum it up in a few lines, the lawyers want business web sites set up one way, Google and the search engines what it set up another way and web designers and visitors want it set up yet another way. Sites like epoxyproducts.com (the subject of this thread) try to include all three. Other business web sites (especially new businesses!) just go after one of the three (usually the web designer's model) not knowing or realizing anything about the other two. If you are lucky, you can get away with it, at least for a while. But if you're in business for a few years, the other two will eventually bite you in the butt if you ignore them. I suppose the epoxyproducts.com web site rates the search engine requirements first, the legal issues second, and then the web designer's model - thus making everyone unhappy (always room for improvement in all three approaches)! But from personal experience and as owner of the website and business, I think that my ranking of web site priorities generates the most income (i.e. full time income, year after year, working from home). Few, if any, of the professional internet consultants that contact me have their own web sites matching the income that mine generates (especially if they have to 'cold call/cold email' me and others to get business). I sometimes think they should be asking me for help! cheers - paul oman PS - love the feedback! As suggested below, my lawyer wanted me to have the 'click here' to proceed to the web site after acknowledging the legal stuff. I thought that was a bit too much (only the giant corporate web sites go to that legal extreme) and would turn off too many visitors. I do try to improve and work on the site nearly everyday, but of course product (epoxy) and service have to come before web play. ----------------------------------------------------- IanM wrote: Bruce In Bangkok wrote: On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:09:01 -0500, Paul Oman wrote: Hi Guys! appreciate all the feedback and comments - no bad feelings. Though I would explain why some of the quirks in the web site. - I love the 'who would put a legal notice at the top of a web page' comment. The remark could be the best Christmas present I've every got (could be worth thousands of dollars). Here why: (a made up - extreme case) very year or so there is some 'nut' emails you with a leaky boat problem. You tell him to fix it with epoxy. He buys some epoxy for $75. Next thing you hear is that you are being sued for $50,000 because you told him to use epoxy and he did but the boat sank and his cat died. The lawyers ask if you legal disclaimers on your site and other legal notices that could get you off the hook. You say yes, but they counter that the disclaimers are hard to find, easily over looked etc. etc. Judge agrees and you lose. My disclaimers are right up front as you pointed out - you cannot overlook them. The legal issues involving trade over the internet are not well defined. Issues like trademarks and meta tag usage, and selling products in states you don't have agents in, etc. can get you in federal court. Of course, on such stupid claims you will probably win the case, but not until you've paid a $400 an hour lawyer for 30 hours of his time, flown cross country with hotel and car charges while you sit in the courthouse and your business goes down the tubes. For your information - the legal ramifications of doing business on the web are nasty and still subject to differing legal interp. You could loss everything through no fault of your own. Hope this explains a few things and the risks of internet business. Most of you have read of the suits filed against ebay, amazon, etc. all the time by folks trying to cash in on vague internet business rules. Our site - epoxyproducts.com, has over 175 pages. Hard to organize that many. Our customers range for nuclear power plants to folks wanting to dip there fishing flies into our fumed silica.The guy with the boat doesn't want info on how to paint his garage floor. The beginner thinks he can buy one part epoxy in hot pink. The experienced user wants the pricing on 30 gallons of marine epoxy. Some folks want to know why we cannot ship a certain product to California. Industrial buyers want only access to MSDS info. We could be like everyone and just list products but we try to educate folks about the products and even mention the bad aspects of our products. Like why you might not want to use coal tar epoxy (which we sell) even if the guy at the boatyard told you to. Yes, lots and lots of links. Confusing, but it also puts us at the top of the search engines - something other companies would almost kill for (and something that will make or destroy your company). We do try to make it easy to use the site. Page types are color coded, there is a single page list of products and prices, a site only google search engine, help page/index page (like in a book). Yes, the site is funky. Folks love or hate it but it works (better to be at the top of the search engines and lose a few customers than not be found on the search engines, have an cookie cutter web site and a total of three customers). The site supports my wife and I and one has to be careful not to "kill the goose with the golden eggs" by 'fixing' the web site to conform to the million of other web sites out there. Heck, if it was an ordinary web site, we wouldn't be talking about it now. Maybe having the worst site is just as productive as having the best site? We are a mom and pop business operating out of our home in New Hampshire - guess we also like to color outside of the box a bit too. And we're not trying to get rich off of slick copy/ads etc. huge markups etc. - just want to make a living and pay the electric bill and sleep well at night. - thanks guys and Merry Christmas to everyone! -- paul oman ----------------------------- Paul, I have visited your site a number of times and there is a fantastic amount of information there but, as the man said, it is poorly organized. I understand your reasoning, as you state above, but never the less the site is difficult to navigate. I suggest that one of the reasons is that you probably designed the site and therefore you know your way around the pages blindfolded. For what it is worth, I'd like to suggest that you have a friend, someone who isn't intimately familiar with the site, log on and have a look. Then listen to his comments. I think that the overriding point is that you DO NOT want potential customers to log onto the site and go away frustrated. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) Put your legal disclaimers link on the top of EACH and EVERY article page and your T&C on any page that even mentions a specific orderable product, but for heaven's sake keep them OFF the top of the home and index pages (you might wish to put them immediately below your company blurb on the home page and also put them up with a check box 'I have read and understood . . .' as part of the ordering process). Get the Home page down to 3 or 4 screens full absolute maximum. Loose the light coloured text on the textured background - its hard to read and may even be illegal under your jurisdiction's disability discrimination legalisation. Some of the pages with plain coloured backgrounds are if possible *worse*. :-( Are you actually trying to win an ugly website award for the publicity? Consider adding a decent drop down menu for navigation. It can be done in pure CSS without a shred of javascript. (Look at http://www.grc.com for an open source, free to reuse example then at http://splike.com/projects/cssmenu.html for a minimalist version (albeit in butt-ugly colours so you can see which bit is which) for a version that isn't too much work to customise to suit.) Done right they are cross browser and cross platform compatible for all systems built after about 2000 and useable as a page of text links on anything older. On all modern browsers you can even get them to 'float' at the very top of the page as you scroll down so the navigation bar is always handy. Internet Explorer 6 users will have to scroll back up to the top though. (I'm pretty anti-javascript because just about *all* of the major web security scares involve it. I'm not alone . . . Also Google doesn't do well at following Javascript links so your generally good page rankings could suffer if you do the menu that way) Sort out that site map, the graphic has virtually unreadable text and isn't clickable for navigation. Put the links form site map on the same page below it. I'm sorry Paul, but although you have all that wonderful advice and info there, and are so responsive here, the only way I can work with your site is by googling it! http://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=epoxyproducts.com then add any further search terms :-( I wouldn't have spent so long on this if I didn't think that the technical detail on your site is a tremendous resource that deserves better. |
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