In this week's #FridayFlopFix website review, I'm heading over to Hawai'i in search for a jeweler who could use some website help. Every Friday, I search for a website that's not quite doing the best they could. I want to point out the flops on their website, and suggest some fixes.
I started my review candidate search with the query "jewelers waimea hi." Waimea is a town on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Instead of choosing from the websites that appeared on the first page of Google's results, I looked through the first 3 pages of results to find a site that wasn't ranking very well. Kama'aina Diamond Co. will make a good review candidate. I found them on the top of the 3rd page as shown here:
Their website is:
http://gemsinhawaii.com/
Initial Impression
This is what their home page looked like when I visited:
(click to enlarge)
Initially, I felt that this website had a nice aesthetic, but as I quickly dug into the website, I found several things wrong with it.
In the home page screen shot shown above, it looks like there's a lot of written content, but that's actually a widget that pulls blog posts in from another site. Clicking on the first entry opens up to their account they have with LocalVOX as shown here:
The LocalVOX service helps you promote your business with online reviews, improve your SEO, and provide a blogging platform. Their strategy is supposed to help local businesses be found. According to what I found online, it looks like LocalVOX is charging $99 per month for this service. At the time of this writing, it looks like Kama'aina Diamond Co. hasn't posted a new blog since June 2015. That's 10 months ago, and that's a lot of money to be spending on a service that's not being utilized, which I would call a business flop.
The fix here would be to move those previous blog entries to their website and cancel that extra monthly expense. Not only would that save money, but each blog post would bring more organic traffic to their website over time.
I'm not sure why Kama'aina Diamond Co. chose LocalVOX for their blogging when they already had a blog set up on their website as shown here:
Broken Links in Footer
The footer on every page of their website shows 9 vendor logos. Five of those logos link to the respective vendor websites, but four of them link to dead pages on the Kama'aina Diamond Co. as shown here:
I can't tell if those pages were deleted by accident or if they were never created; either way this is a flop. The fix is to create those missing pages. While they are at it, I also recommend creating another 5 pages for the vendors that link off-site. It's usually better to include details of the vendors you carry (aka designer line page) included right on your site instead of linking customers away from your website.
Product Pages
I admit that I was a little surprised to see the approach they are using on all their product pages. Each of their jewelry catalog pages had photos with invitations to "shop" those categories. I expected them to link to an online product catalog, but instead they all linked to downloadable PDF files. Here's a screen shot of one of them:
This is the PDF that downloaded and opened:
Instead of setting up an online product catalog, it looks like they created Word documents with photos, descriptions, and prices and saved them as Adobe Acrobat files. I imagine they are spending a lot of time creating and updating those files, time that would be better spent managing a real online catalog.
They are also losing a lot of potential SEO by using PDF files instead of building out a real product catalog.
Conclusions
The real problem with this website is the Hibu service they are using. Hibu doesn't offer website features that can grow with your needs. They might be good to start a small website initially, but you will quickly outgrow their limited service.
The overall fix for this website is to move to a different service and rebuilt it. They can even keep the current design if they wanted, but they should consider merging their blog posts into the website and build out a real product catalog.
That's it for this week; 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.
