fire whoever made your website

[oujeeper]

One thing to note, is that I use an unusual screen size at home and I can barely read the links on the left side such as Dry Goods etc. It comes across great on my laptop but at home it's a squinting match to recognize protein skimmer and not powerhead. Not a huge thing but it's the first site I've ever hit this upon. Just an FYI.

 

[Clown-N-Around]

I agree with BraenDead on the too many clicks thoughts. The main problem I see with the site is not having the DryGoods expanded when you first hit the storefront. I also did not like having all text instead of products when I hit the DryGoods page. I would maybe combine a few phrases from the drygood's intro and the main intro paragraphs and not have the extra DryGoods intro page. It has some OK information, but some of the details on the policies are too much for a first hit. I would leave it up to the "About Us" (Company and Policies) page.

I would also agree with oujeeper; increase the font size of the categories.


I like the featured products on the main page, but make the pictures smaller so you can see more at once with less scrolling.

 

[Clown-N-Around]

Maybe something like this for the combined intro to shopping and dry goods??? (This is all copied and pasted from the site, with only a couple phrases added):

Welcome to Premium Aquatics, we hope you enjoy your visit. Our new shopping system is so advanced that it pulls real-time UPS and US Mail rates automatically. With more then 3200sq. feet of warehouse, we can stock a large amount of inventory. We also have drop ship arrangements for some items if it means better service to you.

We certainly are not the largest store out there, and we do not want to be. We are not the smallest either, or a fly by night web only company. We have a solid foundation both in web/mail orders and local business. We like our medium size because we can ship fast, offer high quality products, and most important, service our customers.

Please feel free to take a few minutes and read about our company and policies, or start browsing our catalog. We have links to company information and product categories to your left. If you have questions about our products, click on the Live Chat link Monday-Friday 10-6 (PST/MST???).

 

[Clown-N-Around]

Where I think PA really shines as far as a website goes (and I really want to see it stay this way), is that they come off very honest and down to earth. What they write about their products is very straight-forward, and I appreciate that greatly. I like to know that if they think their live rock is only "ok" right now, they will tell me. I like to know what they actually think of the products, and not some cookie-cutter sales description. This is something that PA offers that most other sites don't (in all forms of business), and is probably one of the reasons they have become so successful. A little bit of heart can go a long way for your business, don't lose it.

I agree

 

[jasonfrey]

I like that idea of combing some products with the drygood intro page. Would let us highlight so more products like the main intro page and we could consolidate most of the information into customer service pages.

thanks

 

[kimoyo]

Hi,
Premiumaquatics is my favorite reef dealer but the website is hurting you guys a lot. Early on when I first got into the hobby I came to your website but because of the way it is designed I left and went to another store (which was a big mistake). After getting feed up with their customer service (and after spending a lot of money that I would have rather spent with you) I decided to give you a try for some streams. After speaking with Jason I switched over to PA right away. You guys have the best customer service but the worst website and even now I will look at your competitors website to figure out what I want and then buy it from you. I'm telling you guys this because I want to see you do even better than now.

Take a look at some of your competitors websites and you can see what I'm trying to say.
1. Lose the darker blue highlight where the categories on left are in favor of a lighter blue. Also lose the black banner at top, either get a nice page long logo or drawing or just leave it white. You really want things to flow on the page.

2. The font is way to small for the categories and they need to be spaced out more. And the underlines are a distraction. You should think about making the fonts black. People don't want to have to squint when looking here and black fonts will help to make the reading easier. The whole goal should be making it easier to read.

3. You should really only have the first level under the categories. It might be better if your fonts were bigger but when you click on a category the frame on the right should change but the categories should stay the same. This is easier to navigate if you want to switch to another category and takes less time to load.

4. Now once you pick your category and your frame on the right changes this is where you should have underlines or borders. You can organize the products by companies where the brand name is highlighted and then its different products are under it. You have to make a sorta table. Right now when I go to your calc reactor page you have it seperated into
Reactor Units
Co2 Guages
Reactor Media
Parts & Misc
and when I click on reactor units I get a whole mess of all the different brands of reactors but nothing is organized. The brands and sizes are all over the place I cannot understand the logic of the ordering (which is important because I would like to have a idea where each item is). When I'm trying to buy a reactor, I want to compare similar sized units from different companies. But first I need to see what each company has and decide what models I like. But because your reactors are all mixed around it makes it hard to do comparisons. You could even have company pages, so when I click on the reactor category I see underlined links (or borders) to the different manufacturers in the frame on the right and then when I click on link it takes me to a page with the reactors from that one manufacturer. This is just one example but the point I'm trying to make is the organization is critical.

Lastly, and this is important, thumbnail pictures. Instead of having only a link that takes you to a product, think about putting thumbnail pictures next to the links also. Many times when I'm trying to decide what to buy and I've already looked at the page with the large picture of an item (which is good) but I'm now try to review and remember which each reactor(or product) looked like. Clicking on the link again just to see a picture takes time and sometime can make you lose your trend of thought. But if there is a small thumbnail picture there you don't have to click and reload the page.

HTH,
Paul

 

[kimoyo]

Also, a quick search that is right on the store page (maybe above or below the categories) could also help.
Paul

 

[jasonfrey]

hi Everyone,

Thank you for the help. Please check out the site now. I have changed the top navagation bar and the colors. I also have added new buttons for the navagation bar and also the add to basket, login, buy one, next buttons are not all nice blue shaded buttons instead of generic buttons.

I also made the search link include the catagory now. So instead of just having a search only page, the search page loads up in the frame window and you still have access to your catagory links without having to go back.

Here is the big question though. I added a global header above the navagation bar buttons. Has our logo, contact/info and email logo, and some products on sale. So this would stay with you on every page.

So does that look too much like Spam? Or do you like having those products on sale there? It seemed like the top was missing something. So I'm thinking either we promote hot sale items like that on the top, or we just put our logo and maybe some contact info with our phone, email, etc across the top?

thanks

 

[kbecker]

It looks too much like spam and is a bit of an eye sore to me. I would also change your index page to your current "merchant.mv" site as all anyone does is just click on the "dry goods" link anyhow.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[BraenDead]

Well, personally I am not a big fan of graphics thrown all over such as you have with the "add one to basket" and "buy one now". It seems out of place and doesn't "fit" with the rest of the site. Also, the top bar (both the ads and the 5 tabs) seems to not mesh with the rest of the site. Overall, I think you need to design a theme and stick with it throughout the site. This includes colors, style, etc... Personally, I think having sale items on the top is nice. I would much rather look at what you are advertising when I am on your site compared to other sites that have generic ads or banners for xxx company.

I still feel you should change your site layout so your initial page takes you to the store front, and I also think you should expand the dry goods section by default to eliminate 2 unnecessary clicks.

If you need help with anything (code, design, theme), I would be willing to help out if you would like. With the time you guys have spent helping me in the past, its only fair I offer to return the favor.

Bob

 

[Snarkys]

i think you should make a full list in the home page like marine depot has. one click can mean allot as far as being user friendly goes. nice to see all of whats available right from the start.

the search function never worked for me before but now does , that's a big step in the right direction : )

to be honest i have visited your site countless times and i had no clue you sold live goods : ) you guys should seriously consider making another site for that stuff like www.premiumaquaticslive.com

you may seriously want to consider hiring a web design firm. it is prolly money you would make back ten fold as you get tremendous growth from your site being more user friendly . at the very least you should seek out a good one out and hire them as a consultant so they can just give you some good ideas that your in house team can implement yourselves.

on a side note i prefer to order from you guys because you are so much closer to me and i get the package in 2 days rather than 5 but its hard to turn down marine depots free shipping. It doesn't look like they will be getting rid of that any time soon, it may be worth your while to seriously consider matching their shipping policy.

 

[APorter]

I've never found the site to be horrid to navigate. It took me one click more to get to a product on Premium Aquatics than MarineDepot.

 

[javajaws]

It always seems like the basket contents on your site are cleaned out to fast. I'll put something in the basket in the morning and not get around to ordering until later in the day...only to find my basket empty. Does this behavior change if you are signed in when placing items in your basket? Some sort of improvement here would be nice.

 

[Reefbone]

When I first went to your site I thought there were pages missing. This is why. It used to be that if you clicked "Protein Skimmers" on the left, where you would expect content to be in the main frame was blank. However now in the main frame you direct people to look back to the left to pick a brand. Why shoulds you have to actually say..."To your left, you will see many Sub-Categories of protein skimmers." ? Why don't you put the subcatagories in the Main Frame? You should never actually have to tell people where to look. I realize this must be alot of work for you but I have to agree... great store with a poor website. Maybe you should consider getting if professionally done but then maintaining it yourself. Even if it cost 5K to begin with, I bet those those inital lost orders would make up for it quick.

 

[jasonfrey]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the input. We are working on getting the drygoods link removed, so the full list is what you see. Just trying to figure out how to do it. On the live aquatics website idea from "snarkys" we have considered this for the last year or two. I think we will proceed to make a live only website that can be more dynamic and "cooler". Since most people shopping drygoods are just wanting to find there info, buy and go home. Where the livestock guys are wanting to stay around and look at some cool pictures and decide what to get for there tank etc. So they wouldn'd mind having more graphics and picts etc.

on "Javajaws" comment. The baskets expire in only 30 minutes. This is because of inventory. When you add an item to your basket, if we have it tracking inventory, you take that product from everyone else. Basically it's on hold just for you and no one else can buy it. So some items, mainly in clearance section that only have 1 available they become out of stock. Then no one can purchase and if you don't, we loose the sale. So we have to sweep them often.

What you can do though is use our "gift list" module. Just view your cart and hit save to gift list. It will save all your basket contents for 30 days.

on Reefbones comments: The catagory page is one of the biggest problems. I put those notes to look to the left because it was amazing how many people don't see that tree break down and show the other links, so people were having problems finding the sub catagories.

Ideally having them in the content page would be great. Here is the problem though. The sub cats are created through Miva, it's a script, we add them and the links are generated automatically. To put them in the main content page, we would have to use HTML and hard link each one. That itself would take one person probably hundreds of hours. That's not what worries me though. If we make any changes, we might forget to update those and then have problems. Where when we make changes to a sub catagory, all links are updated automatically.

So we just need to figure out how to do some of these things. I think we are making progress and we'll get it spruced up. With thousands of products, it's pretty difficult to make changes.

We will look into a professional web design team. If they could tweak the store It probably wouldn't be too expensive, but if it would be a tear down and rebuild we would be looking at more then 5k, probably 15-25k which would be out of our budget.

thanks

 

[javajaws]

Hi Guys,
on "Javajaws" comment. The baskets expire in only 30 minutes. This is because of inventory. When you add an item to your basket, if we have it tracking inventory, you take that product from everyone else. Basically it's on hold just for you and no one else can buy it. So some items, mainly in clearance section that only have 1 available they become out of stock. Then no one can purchase and if you don't, we loose the sale. So we have to sweep them often.

What you can do though is use our "gift list" module. Just view your cart and hit save to gift list. It will save all your basket contents for 30 days.

I can't stress enough how inconvenient and annoying this is (30 min restriction). While I love the live inventory, I think you could keep that functionality in addition to extending the basket time by not subtracting items in a basket from your inventory until a later phase of the checkout. If items are out of stock by then you could just tell the user then what happened.

Also, on the wish list...it would be REALLY great if you could add out of stock items to it.

 

[jasonfrey]

Hi Javajaws,

Unfortunately that is just how the inventory system works, it removes when you add to the cart. Few years ago it would remove when you checkout, but then you get customers with items in there basket, they go to checkout and someone beats them to the punch and they get really upset. So they changed to add to your basket inventory.

This is one of the reasons why changes are difficult to make. To do anything like that requires programming, not just website code, but actual programming. Then there is always a drawback to anything you change, so you have to get something you have to take it, so it's really difficult to find the happy medium to keep the majority of people pleased.

On the wish list, i'll check into seeing if it can be programmed to allow out of stock added.

thanks

 

[Carlos]

Jason,

There are carts out there that allow you to have the program email you when the item is added to inventory.

There is nothing more annoying than adding to the cart only to find out that the item is out of stock.

You can also use the wishlist mode.

Carlos

 

[fry-man]

The baskets expire in only 30 minutes. This is because of inventory. When you add an item to your basket, if we have it tracking inventory, you take that product from everyone else.

Thatââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s the same response I got when I called to complain about continually having to refilling my basket. It's a shame since PA gets such good feedback and I wanted to shop there. Their web site didn't fit my shopping habits so I went else ware.

 

[jasonfrey]

HI Again,

On the expired shopping carts, I understand some of your points, but I don't think you are understanding how inventory works and how it's not fair to keep an item on hold for a day just while you think about it. That's why the gift list is there, it's easy you just lick the save button and will save your cart for 30 days. THat's why I don't understand why this seems to be such an issue that you would shop elsewhere? Like I said, we want to make shopping easy for everyone, but you have to have a happy medium and try to please as many as possible.

So anyway, we got side tracked on this shoping cart expiring thing.

I got the drygoods catagory deleted and the main list is availalbe in the main store display now. So what does everything think of it now? Talking about the list only. Trying to fix one issue at a time.

thanks