It's time for the #FridayFlopFix where I review a random website from a local retail jeweler. The goal is to find some obvious mistakes, or flops, and suggest ways to improve upon, or fix, things.
This week, I'm looking for a candidate jeweler in Meridian, Idaho. This is the Google search results page I saw when looking for "jewelers Meridian, ID":
The first two jewelers in that listing, Simmons Fine Jewelry and Lee Read Jewelers, have nice websites and wouldn't make for a good flop-fix, but that last one is a perfect choice. The name of the store is Diamonds Fine Jewelry with the website:
http://diamondsfinejewelry.com/
First Impressions
This is what the home page looked like when I visited:
This company chose an unusual strategy of posting a video on their home page and nothing else. This seemed a little suspicious to me and for a moment I wondered if this was even a real jewelry store. The name "Diamonds Fine Jewelry" sounded a lot like exact match keyword spam than anything else. Their About Us page doesn't say anything specific about the owners of the store, other than they opened a real store in 2007. I found it very odd that they didn't mention the owner's names anywhere, nor did they have any photos of the store on their website or in their Google My Business account.
After a little searching on Google Maps, I was able to confirm they are a real store, shown here:
The flop here is the complete absence of store photography and personal information on their website. They should at least rewrite their About Us page to include the owner's names along with photographs.
URL Strangeness
Their website is being fed from a "D" directory. Take a close look at this:
http://diamondsfinejewelry.com/d/
No matter how hard I tried, their home page always redirected back to that /d/ location. That's an odd misconfiguration of a website, and it's a flop. People linking to your home page will link to your main domain name (http://diamondsfinejewelry.com) in favor of any extraneous locations. Even Google is linking to http://diamondsfinejewelry.com in the SERP, shown here:
This particular flop will dilute any link building efforts you are trying to accomplish.
Once I dug a little deeper into their site, I discovered that they are using the Drupal CMS. Drupal is a lot of overkill for a website like theirs. Going further, I then discovered that their webmaster must be using Drupal to manage several websites on the same server. I found the same misconfigured "/d/" directory on these websites that are being managed by the same Drupal setup:
- http://languagelodge.com/d/
- http://www.bogdenoutdoorequipment.com/d/
- http://mountainbilling.com/d/
I would suggest that they fix this /d/ issue by contacting their webmaster, however that would lead to a bigger issue of 301 redirecting all those current URLs to new URLs. Instead, I recommend that they fix this during their next website redesign and subsequent 301 URL update process.
Privacy Policy
The internet is more involved with capturing customer information, especially through monitoring how customers browse through a product catalog. Although it might seem like an innocuous page, the website privacy policy is a necessary evil for all websites. Several trade organization, like BBB, also require you to have it.
The DFJ website has a coming soon notice on their website that you can see here:
There are two ways to fix this flop, first is to hide the page from public view until it is filled in, or second is to simply fill this in.
You should never have a coming soon page visible on your website. That's always a flop.
Product Detail Page
I was very impressed with the attractive photos they had in their product catalog. It looks like they put a lot of effort into them, as you can see here:
Several of their products had multiple images, and all of them had related products set up at the bottom. I found this page to be very aesthetically pleasing, but it had two flops that I quickly found.
The first flop was the lack of a zoom feature on the product photos. Those photos were very attractive, and certainly print and social media worthy, but I wanted to see closer details.
The second flop is that the website misleads you into thinking that you can order online by clicking the add to card button, only to then see the message "we currently do not have a shopping cart" that you see here:
You should not mislead your customers into thinking they can order online; more importantly, you should not waste their time with non functioning buttons on your website. The fix here would be to hide that small round add to cart button.
That's it for this week's review; I'll see you next time...
FTC Notice: I randomly choose this website and won't be telling the retailer jeweler that I'm giving them these flop fix ideas. Unless someone else tells them, they will only find out about this Nugget if they use Google Alerts or examine their Google Analytics and Google Search Console. I'm not doing this to solicit business from them, but rather as an educational exercise for everyone. This #FridayFlopFix is completely impartial and all my comments are based on previous experience in my website design and marketing agency, and from my personal research data.
