First Attempt

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Tomgard
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First Attempt

Post by Tomgard » Sat Aug 23, 2008 4:46 pm

New AC7 Site - would like some feedback if you have any to offer. The site feels really choppy and the navigation needs some work....
http://www.schoolsupplystore.com
Bryan Bundgaard
AC7 User http://www.SchoolSupplyStore.com

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gjaros
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Re: First Attempt

Post by gjaros » Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:01 pm

The site looks OK, but there are a few layout issues.

On the main page, when "Listen Up!: Alexander Graham Bell's Talking Machine" shows up in the featured products the stars for the reviews are over the "Random House Books for Young Readers" text.

Also, the right side of your page is not in line with the right edge of your header or footer on your home page.

The site looks pretty nice though.
Image
Image

Mike718NY
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Re: First Attempt

Post by Mike718NY » Sun Sep 07, 2008 5:39 pm

The site looks good, but when I went to add something
to the cart, it took 20 seconds or more.
What web hosting company are you using?

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Tomgard
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Re: First Attempt

Post by Tomgard » Sun Sep 07, 2008 6:07 pm

It also takes a very long time to do any sort of keyword search as well. Plesk is the name of the hosting company and I am not all that happy with the prefromance at this point.
Bryan Bundgaard
AC7 User http://www.SchoolSupplyStore.com

tongol
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Re: First Attempt

Post by tongol » Fri Sep 12, 2008 9:49 pm

Bryan,

Great first attempt it is impressive. I wanted to see if I could help with the performance as well as some other tips that you might find useful. Couple of things below you may not be aware of but if you already know I do apologize.

First Plesk is the software or control panel you are using to manage your website not the name of the hosting company. It looks like your registered your domain name with GoDaddy.com. The two major control panels for shared hosting packes are Plesk and Cpanel.

The other issue is I strongly recommend you enable privacy protection or use a PO Box for your Domain as wells a garbage email account and remove your telephone number. GoDaddy.com offers a privacy feature I think it is 8-9 bucks it is an option in your control panel under GoDaddy.com. Right now all your information is out for anyone to find. I did a copy and past from whois.net. For example go to http://www.whois.net and type in your domain name. The privacy protection from GoDaddy.com will hide all your personal information and is a great way to protect yourself from email spam, corporate direct mail spam and telephone spam. Many first time webmasters and website owners aren't aware of Domain Privacy Protection.

Bundgaard, Bryan
bryanbundgaard@yahoo.com
School Supply Store, LLC
7452 W Via Montoya
Glendale, Arizona 85310
United States
(602) 930-6111

It looks like you might have your hosting provided by a reseller for a hosting company called The Planet. Based on the great website you have built and the Flash animation you might want to look a different hosting solution to get better performance. Right now it appears you are on a shared hosting package. A shared hosting package is very economical but you end up sharing your site with many other sites and if any of the other sites are poorly designed your site will suffer.

Shared hosting is great for basic websites but for ecommerce you will want to consider a couple of different packages examples you can look for are VPS or a dedicated server. This will pay for itself and is worth the investment. For example Google can penalize and you could end up paying more for clicks from Google for having a poor performing site. Google has a complex process that takes into the sites performance when it determines the costs for clicks. It is called quality score of the landing page for Ads.

Ablecommerce has some great hosting partners that could help you find a solution that will perform at the level you want. I would looked at Semi-Dedicated Hosting or Dedicated Hosting. I would investigate the Semi-Dedicated hosting or VPS first if you grow and see huge demand plan for dedicated hosting in the future.

http://www.ablecommerce.com/Semi-Dedica ... g-C23.aspx
http://www.ablecommerce.com/Dedicated-S ... g-C24.aspx

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