For this Friday Jewelry Website Review I'm jumping over to Google Chrome's incognito view to search for "jewelry store bloomington mn." The premise of this Daily Golden Nugget is to learn more about your own website by looking at a review from another jeweler's real website.The Google SERP page returned a list of 7 jewelers for me, and I'm choosing the first one: Wixon Jewelers.
Here's the website: http://www.wixonjewelers.com; you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
I have to say that this store seems to be doing everything right online! They took a really bad looking website and recently replaced it with this dynamo! If I had reviewed this website a few months ago, I would have said it was one of the worst, but luckily I didn't find them until now.
Let's dive in!
The Website Design:
Their entire color pallet was well selected. Their top menu is bold, but light enough in color not to pull attention away from other areas of the page you should be reading. Their links in the body of the page are a noticeably different color and underlined. People always understand that an underlined word means it is a hyperlink, and that's good formatting to stick with.
The font is easy to read, well spaced.
Throughout all their pages they use large, crisp, and interesting photographs.
The top menu immediately spotlights the products they carry with the first 4 links and then leads visitors into a well design silo website architecture. Seeing this in such strict practice tells me that they really paid attention to their website design.
They even have their own favicon, which I mentioned this week too!
Their Product Catalog:
Unlike a traditional product catalog that can overload people with thousands of products, Wixon took a refreshing approach of showing a limited number of products in each category with stunning photography.
Here's how they did it:
They show "Jewelry" on the top menu that links to their jewelry landing page here:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/collection/jewelry/
That page is well written and explains who they are and what they can do. My only critique here is that they should not be writing about "them" but rather about their customer. When your website gets to this high level, you should be switching out of the me-me-me syndrome of copy writing and replace that with the you-you-you style that pulls people in and actually sells.
From the jewelry landing page they show images to link to the 6 subsections of their online catalog. The photos they used are engaging and perfectly match what the visitor will find in that catalog area.
Another interesting link from the jewelry landing page is a link to their Featured Designers landing page here:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/jewelry-designers/
That page has 9 very large banners with, again, stunning photos alongside the designer logos. Each banner is clickable and brings you to a product catalog page showing that designer's styles.
Fantastic Engaging Content:
You've got to see this as inspiration for something you should be doing in your own store:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/hopes-corner/
Hope's Corner provides the online version of their newsletter. It's well written and interesting, and it really is how a newsletter should be: Interesting content that relates to you store.
Speaking of engaging, check out this blog post here:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/2013/10/what-does-estate-jewelry-mean/
That's a well-written blog with images and links to products in their catalog. The internal linking they are using matches the silo linking I explained this week too. (I swear they are not my client. Maybe they read these Nuggets?)
Their blogging technique gets better, watch....
They have a Google+ page and they share every one of their bog posts to it, like this one:
https://plus.google.com/105534983312833034786/posts/7PFwqu9yY22
Follow that plus.google.com link, because you have to see this too...
The shared link on Google+ goes to http://bit.ly/estate-jewelry
That bit.ly link is a custom created link, which means they are actually tracking their social sharing efforts through Bitly's tracking. Why is this important? Because they are measuring their blogging efforts to see how people go from social media to their website. Everyone should be doing this!
Oh, and they did the same thing on their Facebook page too, here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151924343704036&set=a.58613259035.65133.58604539035&type=1
And just when I thought this couldn't get any better! I was shocked to see their involvement with Google Authorship. Take a look at this page on their site:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/author/amymeyer/
That's Amy's "author page" as required by Google+. It links to her personal Google+ page here:
https://plus.google.com/116703948498254301442/about
Between Amy's author page, her Google+ Profile, and the blog post, they created the trifecta that Google uses to boost ranking in search engine results. Stellar job here, folks!
Honestly, these are the results I wish all jewelers would achieve, and this is what you could get to if you followed all of my craziest Daily Golden Nugget ideas. Other industries have been producing websites like this one for many years while most of the family run jewelry stores are sorely lagging behind.
The Wixon Jewelers website is using WordPress with the Yoast SEO plugin. I like that plugin a lot, but there are a few stumbling issues with using it.
Tracking:
I already mentioned that they are using Bitly to track the clicks from their social networks. They also have a link in the bottom right corner of their website that says "Get Directions" which is actually a shortened link using Google's goo.gl shortening service. I have to assume they are watching their clicks on that link too.
Additionally, they are using Crazyegg.com to monitor website usability. That means they can see heatmaps that show how people use their website and where they click. Combine all this with their normal Google Analytics, and they have tons of actionable data on how they can make their website even better.
The Cost:
So what did it take for Wixon to put together this website? I assume they have a programmer either on staff or a local person rather than a large agency. There's a lot of attention to detail happening on their website and, if I had to guess, they'd need to trade one of their more expensive Patek Philippes to have an agency put this together for them. I also assume that they have an in-house photographer. Lastly, their staff was willing to step forward and write those blog posts and make them personal. Someone is managing their Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts.
The amount of business intelligence data they are collecting from their site is impressive. I assume they have a consultant helping them analyze it all.
Things that could be improved:
They need to get into YouTube. Maybe they are waiting for me to relaunch my YouTube series of Nuggets again (foreshadowing there; stay tuned).
They don't need their store name in the title tag of their pages. I didn't pay attention if it was in all their page titles, but it was in most. This is not needed because their store name is woven throughout their site in so many areas, including the footer of every page.
Even though their photography is already great, they suffer from a photography mistake that many jewelry photographers have. The depth of field on their camera is not set wide enough. Look at this ring, for example:
http://www.wixonjewelers.com/jewelry/040729/
You will see that the ruby and the prongs are in focus but the side diamonds are blurry. I also don't like how you have to hover your mouse over the alternate image shots just to keep them visible. It's better to give the user the ability to click and select a different view, then allow them to zoom in closer on that view.
Lastly, I don't know what the competition think about Wixon's new website, but if they are not careful they will soon be losing some of their customers.
There are so many other good things they've done with this website, but I need to control my exuberance!
To Dan, Hope, Jessica, Amy and the rest of the guys involved with your website I tip my hat to you. Great job! You are my new choice for who every jeweler should be emulating online.
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.
