Pro Sports Watches

[Stewart]

Following from yesterday's tutorial where I shared the my developing thesis website www.prosportswatches.co.uk (http://www.prosportswatches.co.uk). Following general feedback I decided to develop on the go so to speak.

Currently prosportswatches.co.uk is based on a standard CSS skinned version of the ecommerce software which I chose, following some great feedback from James. I'm businessily adding products to form the base content and starting to understand the package in more detail. This is certainly not the way the site will look or function when the project is completed but at least I can start getting some SEO benefit - I've currently got no developed brand or customers so the risk is low.

Of course I'm no where on the key words 'Sports Watches' but am no.2 in the world on 'Pro Sports Watches' and no. 1 in the UK! With 120 pages indexed on Google and also visible on Bing... from little acorns :-) More seriously without any work onsite SEO I'm ranking around 20-30 and interestingly using one of the watch models I feature and sports watches i.e. 'RS300X sports watches' no.3

Given that I am in development I've not integrated a back-end payment system so their no chance of accidentally selling anything!! :-)

Concurrently my mind is on site structure and navigation and I'm starting to think in detail about website brand. My current strapline is ProSports Watches - Train Smarter not Harder' but I may shorten it to just 'Train Smarter'

S

[James]

Looking good. Although it's based on the default jshop style, it already looks better than the shocking blue it comes with out of the box.

I notice the product thumbnails are being resized by the browser, rather than by your server. This makes them look a bit jagged at the edges. Assuming your server has the GD image plug in (most do) you should update the Image Settings to automatically resize images. This will improve the look of your category views.

Your long term goal should be to optimise your homepage to get people looking for broad search like "sports watches". But you will be surprised how many hits you get from long tail searches looking for a specific product. With a well-stocked store you will get traffic directly to the product pages.

I would be wary about going public yet not being able to buy. Why not update the cart template to show a message explaining when people will be able to buy? And encourage them to sign up for the newsletter so you can keep in touch.

Cheers.

[Stewart]

Thanks for the input - sorted the image dimensions, and I didn't realise until you prompted me to look that a user may indeed think that they have bought something without some temporary modification of the checkout - I assumed (never good) that the checkout process would fail without a payment gateway when if fact it appears to the user that it has completed !!

A couple of quick template changes and I've removed the links to the checkout, indicated that it is unavailable and also placed a holding message on the cart page to apologize and offer the opportunity to be made aware when the shop is open.