If you believe the (mostly North American) superstitions, Friday the 13th (today) is supposed to be an unlucky day. Perhaps it will be unlucky for some couples that breakup before tomorrow, Valentine's Day, arrives. I prefer the optimistic point of view and would rather believe that love is in the air today.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and to honor Valentine's Day I decided to search for a jewelry store in or near a town with "love" in the name. This was not as easy as you might think. Although there are a number of towns and cities across the USA with names like Valentine, Love, and Cupid, very few of them have jewelry stores.
Using Google Maps, I eventually found a few jewelers near Love Point on Kent Island, MD. Shown here:
The closest jeweler is Paula's Fine Jewelry with the website
http://www.paulasfinejewelry.com/
Here's what their home page looked like when I first visited:
(click to enlarge)
My initial thoughts were that this is a simple website with a relatively good color scheme. In fact it's very simple with only 6 pages, including the home page.
There's a "Coming Soon" shopping cart icon in the top right corner of every page. Even though this hints that they will be setting up an e-commerce system very soon, they don't yet have a product catalog on their website. They do have a "Sale" page showing these 4 items:
(click to view larger)
With regard to their SEO, all 6 pages have the same title of "Paula's Fine Jewelry" when they should at least have a different title for each.
Because the internet is ever changing you should never put something on your website that's "under construction" or "coming soon." The best use of a "coming soon" indicator is when that feature is part of a marketing strategy to announce the impending launch of a new feature.
As a website analyst, I always wonder how long it has been since someone announces their "coming soon" features. I investigated Paula's website and found that it was set up on August 9, 2011 and has not been updated since.
The entire website has a time stamp of August 2011, including that coming soon icon and all the items on the Sale page mentioned above. I highly doubt those 4 sale items are even in stock any more.
It saddens me a lot to see websites abandoned like this. They do have Facebook and Twitter accounts listed in their footer, so let's check those out...
Here's their Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/paulasfjewelry
They set up their account in August 2011 but have not used it at all yet.
Here's their Facebook account:
https://www.facebook.com/paulasfinejewelry
It looks like they set up their Facebook account in March 2011, and that they update it every once in a while.
Recommendations
If Paula were to ask me for advice, I'd tell her to remove that coming soon icon from their website, and then I'd tell her to change out her sale items at least once per month. The next step to expand the website would be to add a product catalog with a few hundred items, then perhaps add a blog post once a month.
The Twitter link should be removed from the footer until they start using Twitter.
They should post more products to Facebook and ask questions of their fans to start better engagement. Right now they are primarily using Facebook to promote voting in the Best of Eastern Shore contests, and it looks like they keep promoting that contest every year too.
Bottom line is that they need to stop asking for people to vote for them through social media and they need to start taking online action to show that they are indeed worthy of being voted for.
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.
