WEBSITE REVIEW
E-Commerce Site: Lavender & Sage
Lavender & Sage (www.lavenderandsage.co.uk) is an online shop selling French country style accessories for the home and garden including kitchenware,
general home accessories, dining sets and furniture. The site was launched in June 2006.
1. Layout & navigation – 9/10
- The site is very easy to navigate with a clearly labelled navigation menu on the left side and further navigation using the images at the bottom of the home page.
- The layout is clean and simple with no distracting flash images, animated gifs or too much information that you don’t know where to start looking first.
- ‘Breadcrumbs’ (see
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/term_786.txl) on each page always show you where you are on the website.
2. Content – 8/10
- Website content includes products & images as well as actual text. The site has an excellent range of products & high quality image close ups so shoppers get a good idea of what the items look like. All product sizes/dimensions further help shoppers with their choice.
- We like the individual product descriptions, much more quirky than many bland product descriptions we have come across on other shopping / e-commerce sites.
3. Ease of use / Usability – 8/10
- The contact telephone number to order is clearly displayed on every page of the website, so no searching for a ‘Contact Us’ page
- The online ordering process appears simple and is obvious where to add to the shopping basket and checkout.
- Navigation is clear & easy and pages load very quickly
- Good site search facility brings up many products in the results, although the more specific the query, the better the results returned.
4. Overall online visibility – links/PPC/optimisation etc – 3/10
- A search for ‘Lavender and Sage’ on Google brings the site up at no. 1 but this only helps those who know the name of the site.
- The link popularity count is very low, lots of work needs to be done in this area (see www.linkpopularity.com) – this will help search engine rankings and drive more traffic to the website.
- A search on a keyword from the site, such as ‘dining accessories’ does not show any results for the site in the top 50 of Google or Yahoo.
- We found a pay per click ad on Google for the term ‘kitchenware’ – pay per click ads are necessary to gain search engine visibility quickly.
Summary & Overall Score – 28/40
A nicely designed website that has been built with the search engines and end user in mind. It has been easily indexed by the search engines considering it has not long been launched and already ranks for some keywords, e.g ‘country style home accessories’ ranks no 2 on Yahoo!. However, the overall visibility of the site is still low and being a brand new site, will take time to achieve high rankings in a competitive marketplace.
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