In honor of the jewelry shows taking place in Miami this weekend, I've chosen a Miami Beach jeweler for this week's website review. It all started with a Google search for "jewelers miami beach, fl" and these search results:
The internet of things (IoT) now connects so much of daily life it's hard to remember what things were like 23 years ago when it was just in its infancy. New internet connected devices are announced every day that will undoubtedly shape our futures of personal life and how we reach customers and conduct business. Although there are plenty of new tech toys announced every week, it's the smartphone which has changed how we manage our daily lives.
With all these changes happening in the world around us, it's hard to im... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's good and what's bad? What works and what doesn't work? This is what I try to reveal every Friday as I work through my Flop Fix website reviews. I always start them with a Google search in a random town around the U.S. in search of an independent retail jeweler that could use a little help while also allowing me to publically explain what can be learned from their mistakes.
This week, I began my search for "jewelers Honesdale, PA" and saw these results:
Mobile websites are important, but a growing trend of mobile website design has me a little worried that websites are accidentally turning back the clock to a time of poor usability.
Splash Pages
The splash page was a very popular type of website home page design prior to 2010. A splash page was supposed to welcome a visitor to your site with a pretty image or an animation, and sometimes even music. Typically, there was a big arrow or the words "enter site" lik... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to January 2014 to my directions on how to post to Google+. This is also a continuation of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series giving you the tactics you need to help boost your sales this upcoming season.
This is Part 11 of my annual special Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series packed with tactics to help you during November and December this year. I started this series 3 weeks ago with directions for all the initial steps needed to prepare for the information you'll find in these last few run-up days. The initial marketing strategies overview is here.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 8 of my annual special Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series packed with tactics to help you during November and December this year. I started this series with an overview of the marketing strategies that have worked over the last 12 months and have been expanding on each idea every day since.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I dig down into a random retail jewelry store website to discover the good and bad of what they've done with their online identity. The goal is to learn something that you can also apply to your own online identity.
This week I've decided to search San Luis Obispo, CA for my candidate jeweler. I'm starting my search with the phrase "wedding rings San Luis Obispo, CA." This is the Google SERP that was returned:
This is the weekly random website review where I search for a website candidate in a town near you and review how well their website is put together.
I never know what I'm going to find. Sometimes I find great sites and sometimes I find sites with a lot of problems. I do my best to write down my first impressions of the sites in an attempt to illustrate how a consumer might be reacting.
No matter what, there's always something to learn from.
To kick off the review, I'm searching for "engagement rings ho... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained a little about your website site speed and how to view the Google Analytics report that shows you how slow your website is.
While you could ask your website programmer to help you figure out how to fix your website, there's another report in Google Analytics that gives you initial ideas of what to do. It's called the Speed Suggestions report and it can be... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For this week's Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping to April 11, 2011 and my topic of speeding up your website images. This is an important topic that never gets old.
The internet has sped up tremendously since the days of dial up 14400 baud modems. Back then, it would take 45 seconds to download a 62K image; today, it takes only 1 second to download through cable and 4G connection spee... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to April 2011 when I wrote about image sizes. You can read the old Gold Nugget here. This is still a very relevant topic today that's worth revisiting.
In this age of high speed internet, there are many times when you can get a faster connection through the 4G on your smartphone than through the wired connection y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
Last week I wrote my weekly jewelry website review while I was waiting for my flight to France in Newark Liberty Airport, in Newark, NJ. Because I was sitting in the airport, I had the opportunity to present that review from the point of view of an actual mobile user.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm showing you a few things to watch out for when creating your mobile website. These mobile recommendations come directly from Google from this video.
No Pinch Zooming or Plug-ins
There should never be a need to zoom in on a mobile website. The website content should naturally fit the size of the screen as you see here:
Every year for the last 5 years, many website programmers and marketing guys have tried to say "this is the year mobile websites will take over," but we've all been wrong. I was so wrong when I said 2010 would be the year of the mobile website; back then, it was just the year of the mobile website hype.
Mobile marketing and mobile websites had to go through a few stages of evolution to get to where we are as of today. As smartphones really started... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Good photography of your products is the only way you can sell your products online. Even if your website is ugly, good photography and good customer service will always sell jewelry.
However, there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to your photography, and it has to do with the file sizes.
A typical jewelry product catalog will show a ring in 3 different sizes: 1. As a thumbnail on the browsing pages. 2. As a medium size image on the product description page. 3. As a large image when you want to zoom in to see details.
The lazy web programmer will use the same image for all 3 purposes, but there's a serious drawback to this. You would need to use the largest image, that is image #3, for all locations. Except that large image can be 600KB or more, and we've even seen images as large as 3MB.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Determining the correct size of an image to use on your website can be tricky. Your website probably has a standard image size setting, and if you learn to size your images correctly your users will have a quality visual experience and a pleasant browsing experience.
The first thing you need to understand about website images is that no two web designers use the same terminology. Some designers will ask the "size" of an image when they want to know the pixel dimensions as they appear in the web browser; whereas the "size" for someone else actually refers to the kilobyte size of the file saved on the hard drive.
Jewelry photography is very difficult. You won't sell anything online or attract attention to your store if your photos are too small to see detail, of if the images are too grainy. Grainy images are also referre... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
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