This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review. By looking at the mistakes other jewelers make, you can learn some great things about your own website.For this week's review I searched "jewelry stores near me" on my Android phone while spending time in Stroudsburg, PA. The Google Places results included Kay Jewelers, Piercing Pagoda, and 4 local jewelry stores. I chose the first local jeweler in the Places list: Adam's Jewelry.
The web address shown in Google's results is http://www.adamsjewelrynetwork.com but when you click that link it briefly shows one website then redirects to another. This is a little disorienting since that redirect makes the website appear like it was hacked.
It eventually redirects to this website: http://www.adamsjewelry.net, you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
Technical Issues:
Before I get to the review, I'd like to talk about the redirect method that Adam's uses. Normally when you redesign a website and switch to a new domain name, you will set up a 301 redirect from every page of the old site to the new version of that page on the new site. You could also take the easy way out and just redirect all visitors to your home page of the new site.
With Adam's, they actually used an old programming feature called a META REFRESH that jumps your web browser from the old site to the new site. They set it up so you only jump to the new website *if* you first visit the old home page. All the other pages of the old website are still online, and Google still knows about them. This means anyone can accidentally find the old website and never know it's out of date.
When you create a new website you should always delete the old site and use the "301 redirect" method to make sure all website visitors find the correct website. For Adam's Jewelry they have no idea how badly this is hurting their organic ranking because their old website is not being updated and Google won't show old, outdated website in organic results.
Usability Issues:
The META REFRESH I mentioned above brings you to a simple black website with 6 links, but the links aren't actually hyperlinks. Instead, they are fancy JavaScript links that change what you see on the right side of the screen. I do not agree with the use of these JavaScript links because they might not always work. In fact they didn't initially work on my desktop until I did a page refresh. I might not have noticed that they were JavaScript if they had worked during the initial visit.
What then found most jarring was that the link for "Online Shop" took me to jet another website. This is now the 3rd website design I'm visiting just to find out some details about Adam's Jewelry. It actually jumped me over to http://adamsjewelry.net/index.php.
I'm perplexed that http://adamsjewelry.net/ and http://adamsjewelry.net/index.php are not the same page. This 3rd "index.php" page is a fully functional e-commerce store that has a lot of the same content as the old website I mentioned above.
Even though all 3 of these website designs belong to the same jewelry store, the level of trust drops drastically from design to design. There are far too many scams on the internet that hack websites and secretly redirect people from one place to another. Adam's is inadvertently making themselves look as if they were hacked.
What I Didn't Like About the Site:
* I certainly didn't like all the jumping from site to site.
* There's a static photo of a diamond ring at the top right corner of the e-commerce website. This is a stock art image that was never purchased. The watermark for "iStockphoto" is clearly visible. This is a copyright infringement waiting to happen. If Adam's is caught they will get a minimum $1000 fine.
* Many of the product category sections of their new e-commerce site are blank, like Diamond Earrings. These categories should not be on the website at all if they don't have products.
What I Liked About the Site:
I really tried to find some redeeming quality about this website. I suppose I do like the simple website design of their e-commerce with the top menu, but the site is very cluttered... so I guess I don't like anything about it at all, really.
Incorrect SEO Issues:
I had to compare the old website to the new one for a moment. The old website had a lot of written content on it that as copied to the new e-commerce site word for word. I've noticed a few times when Google didn't penalize a website too much for having duplicate content on the same domain, but in this case it's the same content on adamsjewelrynetwork.com and adamsjewelry.net. From Google's point of view the newer website is copying from the older website, and that will lower the chances for adamsjewelry.net to appear in organic results.
There's a tone of other SEO issues with this website, but I'm not going to bother mentioning them. This new e-commerce site was created by a franchisee for the website company WSI. Although WSI provides a variety of website and SEO services, it looks like Adam's isn't taking advantage of any of them.
After last week's review of an almost perfect website, this Adam's Jewelry website is a disaster.
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.
