This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review to help you learn more about your own website by looking at a review from another jeweler's real website.In honor of the JCK Show in Las Vegas I decided to search for "jewelry stores las vegas" to see who was in the area. The first jewelry store in the Google+ Local list was MJ Christensen Diamonds. I was a little wowed when I look at their site because they are doing everything right. Not much to learn from their mistakes so I had to move on to the next jeweler in the +Local list...
It turned out to be a tossup between The Jewelers, Inc. and Summerlin Jewelers. Summerlin was listed first when I searched in Chrome, but The Jewelers was listed first when I searched in Firefox. I decided to review The Jewelers this week since their site is more of a disaster, and I'll save Summerlin Jewelers for next week. Summerlin's website is a vendor created site, so that will be interesting.
Here's the website: http://www.thejewelers.com, you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
I don't know The Jewelers, Inc. but according to their website it's a chain of 10 different stores in and around Las Vegas. Some of the stores are even open 24/7. I'm not sure who's in charge of their website, if anyone. The copyright notice on the bottom of all their pages says 2008 and the gold seal at the top of the website says "Celebrating our 35th," which was back in 2011.
They have a mobile website too, which is essential since their regular site is built in Flash 9. The copyright on the footer of the mobile site says 2011.
I a little perplexed by these copyrights because I can clearly see that the time stamp in the design of the Flash website says June 11, 2009... not 2008; and the time stamp in the mobile website says August 27, 2012... not 2011.
I took a look at the source code and one again found it was generated by Adobe ImageReady. I. Just. Want. To. Cry... I covered the outdated ImageReady technology in last week's jewelry website review.
Usability Issues:
The entire "desktop" website is created in Flash. That pretty much covers every problem imaginable! But okay, let me try to be at least a little objective since full Flash websites were still common enough in 2008. *twitch*
The top navigation menu works relatively well, and it's responds faster than many current day JavaScripts that produce the same results. Of course, this Flash driven menu makes the internal pages of the site invisible to Google and Bing. The dropdown menu uses white text on a black background, which easily blends into the text on the page. This is a little confusing and they should have used some type of solid border around the dropdown menus.
There's some type of Flash error happening on the website that you might see as you move your mouse around. It flickers and briefly shows a distorted version of the top navigation menu.
What I Didn't Like About the Site:
I'm not sure where to begin. This site is campy, even by 2008 standards. There's an annoying animation in the top right of every page showing a "pouring" of diamonds. It's very distracting.
The home page has auto-play music. MUSIC! Again, this was typical of Flash websites. Although, I have to admit that after forcing myself to listen to how it loops I started to enjoy it. Maybe it was brainwashing, but music has no place on a business website. My tracking shows the most number of people are viewing jewelry websites between 11am and 2pm. That's obviously during work hours and certainly a bad place for sudden music to start playing.
There's a link for Press on the top menu. It goes to a "Coming Soon" page. Seriously? Coming soon since 2008? I think this might be a coming soon world record.
What I Liked About the Site:
This was difficult. Each week I try to look at the entire website I'm reviewing to find things I like. I was initially satisfied to see they had a mobile website, but that turned out to just be a badly formatted non-flash version of their website. So I poked around their pages and a really nice Our History page. It was interesting to read how many famous people have bought jewelry from them, starting with Elvis Presley himself back on December 2, 1976.
Incorrect SEO Issues:
The only reason I found The Jewelers, Inc. in the Google SERPs is because an account for them exists in Google+ Local. It's an unclaimed account with 5 reviews.
Searching Google for "site:thejewelers.com" shows 109 pages indexed, but many of them are tagged by Google as [Flash] pages. Have you ever seen a page tagged as [Flash] appear in search results? You've probably seen [PDF] tags, but [Flash] is rarer than a 3ct FL diamond.
There's no real sense pointing out the obvious mistakes with their SEO. They need to start over.
That's it for this week's basic review.
FTC Notice: I randomly choose this website and won't be telling the retailer jeweler that I'm doing a review. Unless someone else tells them, they will only find out about this review if they examine their Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. I'm not doing this to solicit business from them, but rather as an educational exercise for everyone. This review is completely impartial and all my comments are listed in the order that I discovered them.
