Bio-Medical Equipment Website Review

[greger]

Hi everyone,
About three months ago I launched my new website selling rapid home testing equipment for std's(sexually transmittable diseases). My average sale per week is 10 test kits, but I'd like to see that number increase and I cannot do so without feedback from you guys.
Please review the site and be dead honest about any flaws you may find. Any feed-back which helps me improve my site is appreciated!

www.pharmahouse.com

Thanks a million!

[bbparis]

Your website looks nice, but the speed of navigation is slow.

[deadmix]

the webdesign is perfect, just the background take a lot to load... goodluck

[greger]

Thanks!
I'm aware that it takes quite a while to load it and I'm prone to think that's because of the slideshow. I'm especially wondering if there are any ways to improve my site e-commerce wise, and if anyone has experience with what really works in grabbing customers attention.

[IamOnStage]

Is the company UK or USA based? Do you ship to UK? These are the first two questions i would like to be answered before i would buy.
Product information needs to be more informative and also needs to sell and encourage me to buy. The product page looks a little bland. "Buy Now" buttons attract more attention if they are in a different colour to the website colour theme. i.e. not blue, as blue just blends in with the rest of the site.

Other wise very good. Perhaps analyse the visitors stats and see what they exiting the site from etc

Good Luck!

[Greg Baka]

Here are a few things I noticed:

1) I do not see a Description meta-tag. You should probably add one that includes the names of the three diseases.

2) The cycle time of the slideshow is very slow. Speed it up to keep people's attention and get your message across.

3) There are no clues to tell a person which test to buy. Consider adding a page that lists symptoms of each disease. Are some kits only for men? If there is no easy way to tell which kit to buy, consider adding an item which is ALL three kits at a little discount.

I hope this helps,

Greg

[greger]

Thanks guys,

As some of you suggested I've removed the slideshow, and it has increased the speed significantly. I'm also adding metatags. I also bundled the kits with a discount when buying all of them. I hope this will help. My only problem now is that I don't get enough traffic. I've tried with Google, and I spent 200$ in one week with close to zero results. Perhaps I'm using the wrong keywords, and I will have to look into that. Do you see any other flaws which I should fix. And I never really got that part about the slideshows. On one hand I think it looks great, but on the other it's a curse since it kills site speed.

If you guys have more ideas, please share. They are greatly appreciated.

Greger

[ortho85]

These are the thoughts of an amateur, and I haven't gone into the whole site.
1. I don't like the landing page. I think you need and explanatory page there.
2. It loads a bit slowly for me - maybe Firebug & Pagespeed.
3. Could Contact Us be better named as Ask Us? Or at least have a hint show up when you hover?

I like the layout or theme (whatever it's called).

[VectorX]

1. I think the site itself looks sparse.. That gives it a nice "clinical" look but also gives it a sort of "home grown" feel for me. I expect more information when coming to a medical industry site. How do I know which test to buy? It might help to have people get the information they would look up from WebMD right on your site.

2. The site load times are attrocious for me here in US. I am on a 20M Download connection mind you. I think you are hosting this at home or something?

3. Also:

Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

I am guessing you are getting many server errors in your logs. Makes it difficult to critique a sites design when the infrastructure is sub par.

[greger]

1. I think the site itself looks sparse.. That gives it a nice "clinical" look but also gives it a sort of "home grown" feel for me. I expect more information when coming to a medical industry site. How do I know which test to buy? It might help to have people get the information they would look up from WebMD right on your site.

2. The site load times are attrocious for me here in US. I am on a 20M Download connection mind you. I think you are hosting this at home or something?

3. Also:

Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

I am guessing you are getting many server errors in your logs. Makes it difficult to critique a sites design when the infrastructure is sub par.

Thank you for the critique,

I agree, the load time isn't good enough, far from it. Reason is as you said. It's hosted in Norway + some heavy content. I should change this to a U.S based server as soon as possible. As for the information part, you're saying the same as most people here, that it lacks information. I also agree to that. I wonder if it would be suitable to design a landing page with only a few featured products and incorporate that into an info-style poster. For example, use a doctor model, next to a chlamydia test with lines such as ''Do you have an STD? Get tested at home etc.. Then I should add a new menu bar with symptoms and list all of the common symptoms people face after contracting the various STD's. I'm also thinking that some people are dodging the site because they don't want to use paypal, or with that being said, they are unaware that paypal offers credit card purchases.

Does anyone have experience with this and how customers view paypal. Is it better to offer a plain credit card check-out next to paypal?

I haven't had a big problem with server errors this far. For a while I had problems with 400 Bad Request regarding the syntax but I worked that out.

Again, thanks for your help everyone.

greger

[navyfalcon]

Remember: The first thing a visitor sees is the title and description. This is where you get them to visit the site. Then information, site design, navigation etc. gets them to stay (reduce bounce rate). So to increase visitors you rely on keywords and site position. The closer you are to page 1 position 1 the better.
To do this, you need to use good (hopefully free) keyword suggestion tool. Reason: sometimes singular words have better rating and sometimes plural words have better rating. Sometimes synonyms have better rating. The one I use is "http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html" (it is free) but there are several other free ones that are as good (search the internet).
To check the results of changes, you need a good analytics software. Different analytics are better for different things. You probably need one for traffic and one for conversions (ie how many visitors buy the first visit, how many the second visit, etc). Also a click heat map helps on conversions. Going up has a free one. For your web page meta tags you probably need a webpage analyzer. There are several free good ones. You can't improve effectively without proper software and some very good ones are free. These tips should help improve traffic and conversions.
If you want, I can list some free software that helped me.
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hope this helps
falcon

[navyfalcon]

Remember: you can speed up load times with external CSS and images as sprites (http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp). This may help.
Also many javascripts can be replaced with CSS very effectively. Sometimes this helps for speed. There is a good website alalysis for website speed.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ (it is free). Also check the internet for "free image to sprite software".
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hope this helps
falcon

[greger]

Remember: you can speed up load times with external CSS and images as sprites (http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp). This may help.
Also many javascripts can be replaced with CSS very effectively. Sometimes this helps for speed. There is a good website alalysis for website speed.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ (it is free). Also check the internet for "free image to sprite software".
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hope this helps
falcon

Thanks Falcon for an awesome feedback! I will definitely look into this and see what can be done. I also like the keyword part. I certainly need to increase my organic customer base, and this will help me!

Again, thanks a lot.

Greger