4 bedroom, 2 baths, 2-story 1930's Colonial home for rent in downtown West Palm Beach close to Palm Beach, the Atlantic Ocean, City Place and Clematis Street,
olivewpb@yahoo.com or call us at 202-787-3819
$3900 month
 Owners
olivewpb@yahoo.com

I just thought of something else. Amazon has a 'people who bought this, also bought....' feature. I am not enough of a web expert to know how easy that is to set up, but I think it is a cool idea.

Another possible thing to nick from Amazon is the wish list. Especially for people expecting a child, it is great to be able to tell grandparents, friends, etc where to buy something they actually want. Perhaps you could make this even more attractive my joining with other baby related retailers (eg selling cots, bedding, etc etc etc) and have some kind of joint wish list. Linking with others may also improve your search engine positioning. The wishlist should be easily emailable to others with just a couple of clicks, if possible. again, a real techie would need to tell you how to do this.

If you do set up a subscribers newsletter, please could you send me an email at deviclark@newleaf.fslife.co.uk and I will subscribe.

Good luck!

Fantastic website with a great "child-friendly" feel to it. The clothes look wonderful (coming from a dad to a gorgeous five month old girl) and I really wish you all the best. I have worked as a usabilty/customer experience 'person' just to let you know that my comments are based on experience and years of watching people use the web to study how they could best achieve their goals. I'll limit my comments to just 3 rather than become a bulletin board hog.

Firstly, your home page can retain all of that fab look and feel while still achieving more. This is a great place to have billboards pointing to specials, new designs, best sellers, etc. This could be in the form of small blocks of text with links to the relevant web page.

Secondly, you could make you main navigation a short cut for returning visitors by using 'fly-outs'. To see an example of what I mean by this visit www.propertygenie.co.za and mouse-over the Find A Property link on the to navigation. What I mean by this is that your Shop link could expand into a set of quick links to the pages showing tee shirts, bodysuits, etc. (I'll sneak another suggestion in here - put your main navigation at the top of the page like other sites do - convention is wise to follow on the web).

Lastly, the page where customers select size, quantity, etc needs to bring together the decisions so that they appear near each other i.e. the drop down boxes and the call to action. All the 'clicks' on this page need to be closer together - size, gift box, quantity and ADD TO BASKET. This will make it easier for customers to move on in a vital stage of the shopping process. The Add to Basket link could look more like a link by adding an arrow (>>) to it possibly?

good luck
rajhev

rajhev@greenfiremarketing.com

Someone else may have pointed this out but 'exquisite' is spelt wrong in your description of the gift tag under 'gift sets'.
Best of luck with the business.
Adrian

Message for Devi

Thank you so much for your comments. We are certainly planning to make a number of the changes that you have suggested so please watch this space.

At the moment you can only register if you buy from us ( again) we are working on this. If you do want to be kept in touch, then do email us at info@littlebluedog.co.uk, and we will let you know our news.

Thanks again for taking the time and trouble and good luck! Emmax

Well, I am pregnant, so I confess there was some self interest in checking out this site. And my first reaction is : how beautiful! I love your front page. It is fun and appealing. Its only downside for me is that the buttons end up off the bottom of the page, and if I didn't scroll I might not see them. Easily corrected, I think.

Then, I still like the style overall, but I really wanted to see actual photos rather than drawings/logos of the products in the shop section and it took me three click to do this. Once I did see the products, I thought they were delightful. I think I would take advantage of your quality and put a little about the 'premium quality cotton' etc in the part about the products, rather than the 'about us' section. And rather than 'accessories' I would name the items here.

I notice you don't have testimonials on your site - though I can't believe you haven't received any. Why not put them on the site?

When I get closer to the date and thinking about clothing, I may well buy from you. I would love to sign up to some sort of email offers list. Might you create one?

Hope this is helpful.

Devi

Edited by author 24-04-2005 01:41 PM
Some great advice so far. Ben, can you explain your scoring system. Am I right in thinking that 10/5 means 5 out of 10, or are you using some other scoring system?

Kind Regards,
James Saunders
Site-Report.com Limited
http://www.site-report.com
Does your site have the conversion factor?
Call free on 0800 0436908

A huge thank you to everyone who has taken the time to leave feedback, some of you really got stuck in - so cheers. Emma and I have found it extremely useful and will be making some changes to improve the site - so watch this space.

This is a very attractive site and I'm impressed by the way the animation runs without slowing the site. I also particularly like your info section which answered all the questions I could think of.

It would be good to have the navigation at the top so people with smaller screens can see it without scrolling. It would also be good to have your logo and name on every page - when people come into a site via a search engine, they don't always arrive on the home page.

The biggest problem at the moment is the shop. When I click on an item, I have to wait ages for the picture to arrive (even with a broadband connection). Lots of people won't wait that long - they'll just move on to another site. You could improve the download times by dropping the resolution of the pictures. You should be able to do this quite a bit without any noticeable deterioration on screen.

Good luck
Diana

www.wordpooldesign.co.uk

Edited by author 23-04-2005 05:29 PM
Hi
Great site - coming from a mom with a 3 year old and a baby of 6 months...

My 3 year old liked the little flying bird - though if the site is "blue dog" then I reckon the focus should be on the dog - like waggin his/her tail... just a thought!

The "tell a friend" is a great idea!

And - this is just me - I love seeing little kids in the clothes - could you have a picutre of the outift on it's own and one with a kid in your outfit?

Also - I love reading about the owners and founders and seeing pictures of them with their kids... Could you get a picture of yourselves up there?

And how about a capture place for emails - so you can send out emails about new products and designs?

Another though is a colouring-in picture of the little blue dog - have the home page as a black and white outline for kids to colour in...

Great stuff.

Im into recycling babies clothes - using friends stuff etc wouldn't buy these - a lot for something they'll be out of in a few months.

Love the little dot showing you where you are - though don't like like that I have to scroll down to see it... Not so great for people with rsi - repetitive strain injury (from doing too much scrolling!!!)

And being a big fan of breastfeeding I like your "I love milk too!" shirts!!!! Would love it to say "mommy's milk too!!!"

Love to you
Natalie

http://www.grantandnatalie.teamflp.com

I thought your site was visually stunning. Totally different from the norm - which means that it should stick in people's mind. I loved the simple to understand navigation via the bar at the bottom, and also the quirky idea of hiding links to other pages in the illustration too. This, together with the bright picture gave it a childlike quality, which is exactly right for your product/market.

Too often, the temptation is to overdo animation. Some websites can be a little like those dreadful PowerPoint presentations - you know the ones where it seems the presenter has just learnt how to add sound or graphics, and thinks that the more he/she includes, the more impressed we'll be. I felt you'd got your animation about right - simple and visually appealing, but not distracting. I would add though that I'm browsing the site using broadband; you may want to check how quickly your pages load with a normal dial up. I only mention this because some of the shop pages did seem to take a long time to load, even on broadband – but more about that in a moment.

I liked the info page. However, I'm very internet literate - I seem to spend most of my life on the internet, and I wonder if it will be obvious to everyone that the questions are links to the answers? A simple explanatory note might be beneficial.

Now, to my areas of concern - where I'm probably going to echo comments made by others. I was a little disappointed with the limited range available, and also found it difficult to identify on occasions whether I was looking at a photograph or an illustration of the goods on offer. This is perhaps where the childlike qualities of the site come a little undone. Thinking about what others have said about the images not being visually appealing enough to make visitors want to buy – I wonder if the problem here is a lack of bodies? It might be that including pictures of your clothes actually being worn by cute babies would lead to a better connection with the customer. Always remember, with the internet customers are already missing out on the ability to touch and feel (and even smell) the product. You only have one of the senses to appeal to (unless you include sound in your website – interesting idea – perhaps you could include the sound of happy children?) Anyway, the point is you need to make your product as visually appealing and ‘three dimensional’ as possible. The pictures of the clothes are very flat.

My other major concern with the shop was the load times for certain pages. I compared the load times to our own website (www.trainerslibrary.com) and there was a significant difference. What made the problem worse, (perhaps) is that when I clicked on some of the links, I couldn’t even see signs that the page was loading (i.e., the waving flag in the top right hand corner of Internet Browser). This led me to wonder if the site had ‘crashed’. Be aware, we internet shoppers are very impatient – if the page doesn’t load ‘just like that’ we’ll probably click the ‘back’ button and head straight back to Google.
One final thought – why are you encouraging visitors to leave your site by having a links page? It could be that you have a reciprocal arrangement with the sites you are promoting, or some other commercial interest in these other sites, in which case fine (probably). If not though, remember, you’ve worked hard to get someone to visit your site – you want to keep them here as long as possible and not encourage them to pop off elsewhere!

Hope this helps.

Rod Webb
Glasstap Limited
www.glasstap.com
www.trainerslibrary.com

I really liked your site. It was easy to navigate and in no way over the top. I like easy sites where you can see at a glance where you are going or wanting to get to.. The only downside was the fact that the products didn't tempt me to buy (although probably quite a big disadvantage). I would of made the products easier to look at and see rather than going through the whole lot. A Little like the snapshots that you get with your photos!! Overall OK.

Good graphics, selection of links is wise. I think to convert more browsers to buyers you could try putting small pictures of the product (click to see bigger picture) rather than having to look through several pages. Just to speed it up. As a mum, I don't get that much time to browse, especially as I have to use works internet (don't worry, it's a family business therefore I am slave labour)so if I could see perhaps the whole range of sleepsuits for example, I could pick the ones that caught my eye. Speed browsing, if you like. Perhaps change "info" to "FAQ's." It's impressive overall.

Nice looking site - most of the key issues have already been pointed out e.g. flash, browser compatabilityand so on. I don't think amyone has mentioned that the keywords should actually reflect and be contained in the text on the page. As there isn't any HTML text on the pages the keywords are essentially useless. Search engines only read up to a maximum of 50 keywords and start discounting once any particular word is repeated more than about 5 times.

Do the sites to which you are linked carry a reciprocal link to your site?

On our scoring system you scored :

For legal compliance 10/5
For DDA Compliance 10/5
For operational usability 15/11
For search engine optimisation 14/9
Total 49/30
(The second figure is the score that shoould not be exceeded! - contact me for more details.)

Importantly there are no Terms and Conditions of sale and no mention of delivery charges that I can find.

To make this website really work for you there's a fair amount of work still to be done!

Ben Coker
Business Developments Limited
http://www.bus-dev.com
0800 458 3091