My first site for my first business

[vasils]

Hi everyone,

I’m supper new to this. I’m graduating from University of Washington, and always wanted to start my own business with used laptops.

I don’t have much HTML or code skills. I found this great site, to help me build my own site.

I have spent countless hours on my site, trying my best to make it look appealing to the customer.

Can you guys give me some feedback on it…and tell me how i’m doing.

http://www.seattleusedlaptops.com/

[Rob MacKay]

hey :)

Ok, firstly well done for starting something! Its always the hardest part of anything…

I’m going to be quite honest with you, because if this is your business you need to make money from it.

Your website looks like a bad js slider demo. I have no idea what is going on when I get onto your site, I can kinda see that you do something with laptops. I cant really click anything to go anywhere. What stops me using dell and going with you? Or countless other of your competition? Users get frustrated quickly, they don’t want to be trying to figure something out.

Sliders like that should be kept at sliding small images somewhere else – and not your main site.

Iframes are very bad, never use them – especially for SEO – I have given you a link to that.

Personally If I was a customer, I would not give you my credit card details, the site instills no confidence in your skills as a guy who should be selling laptops… To someone who knows nothing about computers, the Internet is something IT guys should know about, because its on there computer – so why is this guys site so rubbish? He obviously knows nothing about laptops… yes its illogical – but that’s the thought process of a user, I know, I used to be a tech support guy lol

Now what I would recommend, is you get yourself a Content Management System and buy a template. Not only will this give you a finished site pretty much instantly, but it will also sort out your SEO problems, as most CMS’s are configured to fight the good fight as to say. So with that in mind: http://themeforest.net get over to theme forest – you can pick up some awesome templates for around $30. I would recomend wordpress, but then I am obsessed with it, WordPress is also free, you can download it here: http://www.wordpress.org

Get a blog running, about laptops – this will really boost your links, even some OS tutorials… other sites will link to them, and then you are in! Twitter is also almost invaluable. Via a blog post and twitter Tutshelf.com managed to get 1190 visitors in a day just after launching, the tutorial in question is also now ranking very high in google for search results.

You have no experience at this, and there is no shame in that! You have now taken your first leap into business, congratulations.

EDIT: Also like Doc Said below – your google links are terrible, but not because of how you placed them, but THEY LINK OUT TO OTHER LAPTOP BUSINESS’ – so your customers would come onto your site, get confused, then see a long to another laptop place and off they go… so you loose a laptop sale, and pick up, what, like $0.10 in a google link click?

[TheDoc]

[edit]lol Robski, juuuuust beat me to it[/edit]

If it seems harsh, I apologize, but I don’t have the patience at the moment to make my words cute and cuddly!

The design is no good. Your home page looks like a Google Ad. The site lacks any kind of proper structure.

The site is bland and unwelcoming. There are spelling/grammatical errors throughout the site (am I going to give a few hundred bucks to some guys that can’t even spell check?).

Navigation? None.

Header? None.

Footer? Google Ads…

Do yourself a favor, go here http://themeforest.net/, spend $15 on a template, and start looking professional!

[tomwalters5678]

I agree with theDoc, and by the way the idea of this, and sites like it, is that you learn from it, don’t just whack the code onto your own site, develop them, and evolve them.

[Author]

Posts