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Bedszone

By admin on 2 December 2010 @ 10:41 AM.

Tags: reviews, ecommerce reviews,bed frames, beds, bedszone, bunk beds, ecommerce, ecommerce website review, electric beds, headboards, mattresses, memory foam mattresses.

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Bedszone.co.uk

Bedszone specialise in beds, sofa beds, mattresses of many various types and styles and also claim to be the cheapest in the UK. Upon immediately landing on the homepage, you are presented with a number of categories from the left hand menu allowing you to easily navigate to what you are looking for. First impressions on the design of the site don't excel, it's not as neat and tidy as it could be but it's nothing major and wouldn't take long to improve.

Homepage

The main product categories are easily identifiable on the homepage and shoppers can instantly see there should be plenty of choice (providing all the categories has products in), this encourages shoppers to stay on the site and browse.

If you can't find what you are looking for, the search bar is clearly visible in the header of the website. The main issue with the homepage would be the limited content and mass of whitespace in the content area. This should really be used to sell the products and shout out to visitors why they should buy here, the reality is, few shoppers will read the barely visible small, grey text on the homepage.

The text should jump out and catfch the shoppers attention ideally, free UK delivery is a great perk and a lot of consumers will only buy from ecommerce stores that offer free delivery, this should be in the form of a banner and visible from all pages, it really is something to shout about and unless it's in the form of a colourful, eye catching graphic/text, no-one will know.

What would work well on the homepage is perhaps a image slider which showcases some of the best seller, most popular products or any sales and offers currently active, you can easily display a range of bed products in a relatively large and clear image as are currently displayed without extending the length of the homepage beyond the left hand navigation menu. This will also allow a significant amount of product related text with each product using CSSAn acronym for 'cascading style sheets'.

Learn more about CSS which will then be indexable by search engines and will allow ranking for a wider range of search queries possible.

Search Functionality & Navigation

The search functionality appears to work with no problems, although the algorithm is very basic so a search for "sofa beda" will display any products that contain the word "beds" as well as "sofa" - This will be down to the ecommerce platform/provider used and there is also appears to be no advanced search functionality which should be standard in most ecommerce systems now.

The search results displayed are not particularly descriptive with only the title of the product being used along with an image. The image is fairly large and with only the title accompanying each result, it leaves a lot of white space on the page. This would look much better and enhance usability if there was a separator between results (such as a horizontal rule) and a snippet from the product description was displayed with each result in the search page.

The top navigation menu is pretty ineffective as it currently is, the order of the items could be arranged as most shoppers would expect on an ecommerce store and the 'HOME' link serves no purpose at all, it links to '/HOME.htm' instead of the root domain, I will discuss the SEOAn acronym for 'search engine optimisation', the series of processes used to improve your ranking in search engines and drive more web traffic to your website organically.

Learn more about SEO implications of this in the Search Engine Optimisation section below. It already looks untidy due to the navigation dropping onto a second line below, but then when you hover over the top navigation menu items, the hover effect changes the text to bold making the items jump around all over the place.

Category Pages

Although there are numerous categories, some are empty and others have few products. This will be disappointing for most as with this type of product, shoppers will like to browse a number of products before making their choice. Those categories that contain a number of products, display them inconsistently (images are of different sizes and product text sometimes extends beyond the grey background. This makes the page messy and gives an unprofessional look. This is likely down to the ecommerce provider again but small things such as this can make such a difference in converting a visitor to a customer.

Products

The first thing I notice about the products, is the use of 'FREE delivery too.....' in nearly all of the product titles, this is partly the reason to inconsistant layout and formatting throughout the site but there is no need to include this in product titles, it makes them look messy and causes the titles to be so long, visitors won't read them all and search engines can't tell what the product is very well due to the number and non descriptive words used. Product titles should be kept as short as possible and only remain descriptive to the product itself, page titles and meta-data on a per product basis should be additionally customisable and if the ecommerce provider can't facilitate this then it is a poor system.

Upon clicking on at least one product, the link was broken (and no custom 404 page in place incidentally), these should be removed if the product is no longer available. Product pages are generally inconsisten, formatting and consistency is crucial on product pages, it's always important to maintain the same style, fonts, colours and font sizes throughout. There is room for improvement here but I've seen a lot worse on other sites. It appears that on most product pages, the product images rarely load, alt text for the images is shown in the right hand column but it appears they are not mapping to the correct directory on the server for the images themselves.

Product prices appear to be pretty competitive, of the products researched, it would appear they mostly beat competitor prices. If priding the business on being the cheapest in the UK, offering a price match guarantee may be an idea and this would be something else to shout about on the website.

Search Engine Optimisation

The SEOAn acronym for 'search engine optimisation', the series of processes used to improve your ranking in search engines and drive more web traffic to your website organically.

Learn more about SEO throughout the website is not particularly effective, pretty much every element could be picked up on from the homepage being untidily formatted and stuffed words, from the product titles all containing free delivery in a particular area and therefore this in the page titles, product titles, image alt text etc. The key is to write unique and highly descriptive page titles and metadata for search engines and humans. As a rule of thumb, try to limit page titles to just less than 70 characters, meta descriptions to just less than 156 characters and limit meta keywords to no more than 10-15. More characters than this in the page titles and sometimes the description will not be visible in the search engines anyhow.

The URL'sAn acronym for 'uniform resource locator'.

Learn more about URL contain the keywords, it is the right idea although uneccessarily include mentions of free delivery and some of the product titles could be optimised. It is also worth nsuring that what are known as 'stop words' are stripped out of search engine friendly URL'sAn acronym for 'uniform resource locator'.

Learn more about URL, these include words such as the, and, it, of, in etc.

Improper use of the header tags is in place throughout the site, a sitewide <h1> tag is found in the header, on most pages, there are multiple <h1> tags. Header tags let search engines know what sections of a page are most important in hierarchical order ranging <h1> - <h6>. A sitewide <h1> tag can sometimes work but I would not recommend this on an ecommerce website where each category, each sub category and each product should have it's own, highly relevant and keyword rich header tag. We would recommend removing the h1 class on the sitewide slogan, giving it a headline or slogan class and leaving all product titles as the <h1> along with category/sub category names on those pages.

There is no custom 404 page on the website so when a visitor clicks through to a page that does not exist, there is nothing helpful to explain why the page isn't there or suggest other pages/products they may be looking for.

A 'Links' page is also linked to across the sitewide, Google tends to devalue links pages these days due to the abuse and spam they have been used for. The links included on the page however do appear to be of relevance which is good, it would be worth renaming the 'Links' to 'Recommended Resources' for example though. There is also an error on the link syntax for that link on every page of the site other than the homepage so it's only accessible from the homepage too.

Conclusion

As far as ecommerce websites go, it has potential - Free delivery, cheap prices. These should fundamentally, be the driving force of this store yet anyone would struggle to notice this in the first 5 seconds of being on the site. There is a lot of work that could be done with regards to site design/layout, formatting consistency and onsite optimisation. It wouldn't take a great deal though to really get these tweaked throughout the site and this would undoubdetly improve the site performance and customer experience.

In terms of ranking for queries in the search engines, theres a long way to go before visibility will be maximised, search engines will currently not be able to differentiate which pages of the site are most relevant for certain keywords, which parts of the page are most important and will generally be left in confusion on what it's trying to rank for other than "something to do with beds and mattresses". With minimal inbound links coming into the site currently, it would be vital to nail the onsite elements before focusing on driving more traffic to the site.

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