WEBSITE REVIEW
E-Commerce Site: Warner Classics Store
The Warner Classics Store website is a classical music download store. It was launched in April 2006.
1. Layout & navigation – 7/10
- The site is easy to navigate with a clearly labelled navigation menu at the top of each web page. However it seems you need to click on each link twice to get the page you want to actually come up.
- 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.
- There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way of browsing the selection of music available for download, searching for music can be done via the ‘search’ page which allows you to search on your criteria of choice.
2. Content – 5/10
- Website content includes products & images as well as actual text. The site at first sight seems to only have a very small selection of music available; however, a search reveals much more music available to download.
- On the home page there is nothing to inform the visitor about the website, and no written content on the home page to invite the visitor to explore the site.
- Each album page is rather light on content, with only the minimum information available. More information about the music would be helpful to site visitors to help with their buying decision.
- The register page does not encourage visitors to do so or what registration is for – it therefore needs some additional text.
3. Ease of use / Usability – 6/10
- Contact page is rather buried away in case visitors want to contact the site with a query – it needs to be much more visible.
- Alt tags are lacking throughout the site – many of images have missing alt tag descriptions.
- The main navigation links need to be clicked on twice.
- When opting to purchase some music, the refund policy notice needs to be in a larger font and stand out more.
- Text on the site is rather small and difficult to read, with little information on the individual album pages. How to use the site is rather small and wordy in places.
4. Overall online visibility – links/PPC/optimisation etc – 2/10
- A search for ‘Warner Classics Store’ on Google does not show the site in the top 30 results – the main Warner Classics website is at no. 50 (number 1 for ‘Warner Classics’)
- 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 ‘classical music downloads’ does not show any results for the site in the top 50 of Google or Yahoo for the Warner Classics Store or for Warner Classics.
- There are no title tags on the website, no keyword rich content on the pages and no meta description tags on the site. No thought has been given to the site’s optimisation or to keyword research.
Summary & Overall Score – 20/40
The Warner Classics Store website has been nicely designed with an easy to use layout, however, the site falls down in terms of usability and actual content.
There needs to be more on the site to compel visitors to explore it and buy the music. The site has a lot of potential, particularly since it is claimed to be the first Classical music download website. Currently the only way of finding the website is via the WarnerClassics.com website.
The website could rank well in its own right which would drive more traffic to the site and produce more sales.
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