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Website not converting – any ideas?

balsamicsauce.com

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Re: Website not converting – any ideas?

#3

Post by bhauer »

Some thoughts:

1. Get a better hero photo. The JPEG artifacts were the very first thing that caught my eye, even before I fully processed what the photo was of. The photo is also too close-up. It's a caprese salad, but because it's so close to the black beads of liquid, that context is lost. Consumers of balsamic use it in context, not alone. The context is lost in this photo.

2. Tune up spacing, padding, margins, line spacing. Some need to be tighter, some more spacious. Right now things look unbalanced.

3. Get a clearer brand logo. The logo is blurry and badly compressed.

4. Keep all elements in your carousel the same height. Right now, the video pushes content down.

5. Messaging on the carousel moves around too much.

6. Consider not even using a carousel. Single photo; single call to action.

7. Use a web font. Right now, everything is using Arial on my Windows PC.

8. Use properly-sized images. On http://www.balsamicsauce.com/pages/balsamic-glaze some images are being scaled in the browser.

9. Use JPGs for photos, not PNGs. PNGs should be use for the logo graphic and iconography.

10. Simplify the scripting on the page. Pet peeve: the site loads scripts from what appear to be a dozen third-party domains.

I'm no expert, though, so take all of my advice for what it is: just some random ideas from a total stranger.

Re: Website not converting – any ideas?

#7

Post by xxpor »

My first impressions as a layman:

A. Have that yellow button be buy now, not read the story. Have the story on the product page.

B. Way too many clicks to order, something like 5 pages to get to checkout. I think it should be Home -> product -> checkout. There's a reason Amazon loves it's one-click.

Re: Website not converting – any ideas?

#8

Post by pallandt »

bhauer wrote: post #3

Some thoughts: 1. Get a better hero photo. The JPEG artifacts were the very first thing that caught my eye, even before I fully processed what the photo was of. The photo is also too close-up. It's a caprese salad, but because it's so close to the black beads of liquid, that context is lost. Consumers of balsamic use it in context, not alone. The context is lost in this photo. 2. Tune up spacing, padding, margins, li…

He's using Shopify for e-commerce, he might not have too much choice in regards to where scripts are loaded from, especially since he's using a few 3-rd party add-ons/plugins/etc. as well.

One thing I noticed is that the Google Fonts request is incorrect, I get ""NetworkError: 400 Bad Request - http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=.|" in Firebug. But this doesn't have anything to do with conversions.

Re: Website not converting – any ideas?

#9

Post by pallandt »

tmandarano wrote: post #2

Bounce rates continues to rise. To fight it, I've tried to simplify the site and have even removed the blog from the main page and moved it to a tab in the header. Mistake? Good idea?

Is this your company or are you just doing this on behalf of a client? If you're attempting to bootstrap and do everything yourself, this might be somewhat helpful for increasing conversions: http://goodui.org/ , although it's targeted at primarily software-based products/services.
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