This is my journey as an E-commerce Consultant
Archive for July, 2007
Website Colours and its effect on company fashion…
1763 days
by Liz
in Consultancy
When a company thinks of its branding it takes alot into consideration. Where I work a light green and ecru/cream colour was chosen. Green is a very popular website colour as it is easy on the eye and promotes a feeling of wealth whereas the contrasting lighter colour for the background is better for dyslexic readers.
But do companies consider ALL the effects?
Now when one of my bosses can in before ebay live he said they were getting new shirts (the last lot where black with a white logo, and could have fit Hagrid from Harry Potter. I did threaten to wear mine as a dress as I could have!) I thought great! No more man shirt episodes. I imagined a ecru shirt with green stitched detail. I didn’t see the shirts before they hit ebay live, but I saw one the other day on our sales director…
…..BRIGHT NEON LIME GREEN with a cream stitched logo. As a woman with red hair I am going to look like a Leprecon on speed even if I get one that fits.
One thing I will say about these shirts,they will turn heads at ANY show!
I just hope they don’t think I am going to wear one when I am visiting clients!
Google tells us what wrong….
1765 days
by Liz
in Web Mastering
Well if your a Google Webmaster anyway! Google has added the feature of a message centre to communicate with their webmasters if they are in violation of any guidelines imposed my the giant. This is a great step, even though some of the comments on Matt Cutts Blog
the webmasters want more. Yes we all do await the day when Google becomes our automated personal SEO consultant with regards to their own system, but if you check out ‘Webconfs‘ this site has loads of ‘checking’ tools and advice on the rules of SEO!
Why Uncle Buck Means Money!
1765 days
by Liz
in Web Mastering
The site Uncle Buck – Payday Advances is a great example of how a website screams out what it does to the visitor, creating website conversions 4 times the average for a website! In a group we conducted an experiment, the website was shown to us by a third party for a few seconds, then we had to turn away and say what the website ‘said’ to us.
My response, was ‘Uncle Buck loans you money’ another response was ‘ Payday Advances £400′ and the best answer was Apply for a loan up to £400, option 1 apply here’
So this website got the message though straight away? Can you say this of most websites? If you website has a high bounce rate and you are struggling with conversions, try this experiment with some random people (I don’t know, on the street, pay some teenagers, whatever you need to) and see if they get your core business from a glance. A glance is what most websites get.
But what about the dark green colour? Symbolic of the American Greenback? David Johnson who wrote this post ‘Color Psychology‘ said in his post
Dark green is masculine, conservative, and implies wealth.
and Joshua Hughes from Digital Skratch Inc says
Dark green is commonly associated with the military, money, the financial and banking
but he also suggests that green is a relaxing colour and easy on the eye. There are other associations with the colour green, but I find these are the most relevant to ‘Uncle Buck’. And of course there is the association with John Candy!
eBay drop off stores….Dropping off?
First we heard that I sold it UK was going into receivership. Now the company Auctioning4u who brought its assets is closing the drop off store model in favour of a centralised system. The drop of stores will become more like ‘pick up stores’ with home collection or customers posting the item to be sold on eBay. Personally I don’t think this model can work. I hope it does, but the most likely response is people who are unable to sell the item on ebay themselves will get someone they know to do it for them. I know this as I have had to sell things on ebay for family and friends many a time!
Is this evident of just a wonky business model or the reducing ebay traffic and sales ebay uk has seen over the past 12 months?
eBay Design Keyword Experiment Over!
1765 days
Well the conclusion was that the URL with /ebaydesign did a lot better than the rest! It is hard to quality such results, but the url /ebaydesign/ was constantly higher in the rankings with 60 hits over the period 18th June to 18th July compared to the other formats /ebay-design/ at 28 hits and /ebay_design/ at only 18 hits. So the ‘winning page’ will stay up and I shall add more content on ebay design services available in the uk.
