This is the Friday Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this Nugget is to take an unbiased close look at a random jewelry website to see what we can learn from it.
Every week I put my Chrome web browser into incognito mode and search a random town for a local jeweler. This week I chose the city of Uvalde in Texas. Specifically I searched for "jewelers in Uvalde, Texas."
According to this search result there might be 2 jewelers in Uvalde:
I say "might" because I'm not exactly sure if Gree's Boutique is a jeweler or not. They do not seem to have a website and their Google+ Local page isn't verified. It also only claims that they only provide jewelry repair services. This is a screen shot from their unclaimed Google+ Local page:
Therefore my review candidate this week will be Milton's Jewelry & Gift. Their website is: http://www.miltonsjewelry.com; you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
This is what the home page looked like when I visited:
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My first reaction when seeing this site is that it must be more than 10 years old. The style is extremely simplistic like the website produced in the mid 1990s at the dawn of the World Wide Web.
Alas, the time and date stamp on the website places it at June 2012. What's even more interesting is that the HTML programming code is very modern.
Upon close inspection of the code, I realized this site was created with Weebly, http://www.weebly.com/.
Weebly is a free or low cost website builder that gives you the ability to create a website easily with drag and drop ability. Weebly is one of the easy methods I recommend when you are just starting out in business and want something fast, and low cost.
Those starting out with Weebly will eventually migrate to some other website platform as their needs become more mature.
Taking a stroll through the Internet Archive I saw that their website prior to 2012 didn't seem much different. Shown here:
(click to enlarge image)
In fact their website has been a simple 5 page site since its inception way back in April 2004.
On their Explore Our Store page, here:
http://www.miltonsjewelry.com/explore-our-store.html
I found an invitation to like them on Facebook, but no link to their Facebook page. I had to go searching for it...
(click to enlarge image)
It looks like they set up their Facebook page and quickly abandoned it when they could not get anyone to like it.
So I really don't have anything good to say about this website. My gut feeling is that they have an established clientele in Uvalde and they feel they don't need a website or online marketing to help with their business.
If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the owners are close to retirement and they don't want to invest in their website at all.
If nothing else, I think they should spend a few hours to clean up the look of their site so it's more organized. Like I said before, Weebly is okay as a starting point for a new business, but an established business might find it limiting.
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.
