new online gift website

[emma huseyin]

hello everyone,i am new to this game so please bear with me,i have just started my own online website this week called my gift street . com would like to know the best ideas for marketing.as i dont really know where to start for the best. feel free to browse my web and leave feedback many thanks emma.

[fourblankwalls]

Great site and very nice design. We are an art company selling art online. We also provide online gift stores with their very own bespoke art departments if needed. You show the stuff, you take the funds, we send to your clients and invoice you later.

If you are interested, we would love to be involved with you. We are Four Blank Walls . co . uk

We also offer a business flyer swap in all of our parcels if you are interested. We have found this works wonders especially for home interior minded people with money to burn.

Regards and well done.

Jason

[thesuperhero]

I wanna show you my blog , but it couldn't accept my URL here.
You can read about Maximize eCommerce Sales Results at

how-ecommerce-helps (dot) com

[SFD]

Your site took ages to load on my PC so even if I saw the site marketed somewhere I would probably leave the homepage while it was loading.
The kids corner image alone is 0.5Mb

Another tip is download some free image software. A lot of your product images are getting stretched or squashed and this makes the site look amateurish.

The site does look nice though, a couple of items on the homepage which I've not seen before and that would make me look a bit further for other products.

[wood1e2]

I like the general look of the website, but I would look at shortening the length of the pages, I am looking on a old PC (steam driven etc) with a resolution set at 1024 x 768. So I have to scroll down to see everything, and more importantly on this page, for example http://www.mygiftstreet.com/index.php?cPath=18 I have to scroll down to see the gift wrap products.

Maybe lessen the dept of your header image and the gift wrap image. Which will then bring the products in view. Which will obviously make it easier for potential customers to see the products.

Also the width is a little wide, no one likes to scroll right, although your website is only a slight right scroll.

For online marketing, get yourself a Google account, where there are webmaster tools. These will help you see what people are searching..although you to tell Google that the site is there, and that you have uploaded sitemaps.

Also you should look at changing your title tags, to match the keywords you want people to find you under on search engine searches. For example 'gifts for him'.

Plus make sure your content matches these keywords/keyphrases.

Then there is link building, obtaining links back to your website with anchor text matching your desired keyword/keyphrases.

Then there is blog postings, article writings, online press releases...it becomes a full time job :)

Hope this has been of some help...If you search this forum, or Google for 'Search Engine Optimiaztion', or 'SEO' or 'SEM' you will find reams of imformation about online marketing... or you can PM me if you need any more help.

[awebapart.com]

Some advice has already been posted in your help please (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=86653) thread, but since this thread might be the only one read by some people, and this forum category is more relevant for my particular advice, I'll repeat my advice here...
hello everyone,i am new to this game so please bear with me,i have just started my own online website this week called my gift street . com would like to know the best ideas for marketing.as i dont really know where to start for the best. feel free to browse my web and leave feedback many thanks emma.

You really should have thought about how you are realistically going to market your site before creating the site, especially in a competitive market like gifts (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=84916).

The order should be:

1. Research your market, is it saturated (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=532700), is there a niche, can I compete with others, how will I market my website, what will be the marketing costs, what realistic income and profit am I expecting

2. If you are happy with 1, only then create the website.

Only within the past year did someone else on this forum embark on a similar gift shop venture to you, and it is worth reading about their experiences (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=624652), and the outcome (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=656326), as well as some of the advice they were given along the way. In this particular case the website owner started off and continued with a better website than your current website, but still found it difficult.

If you have identified your niche and you think you can make a go of it, then my first suggestion for your site is before you even think about getting more visitors to it, check whether the site and your host can actually cope with those extra visitors, without grinding to a halt, falling over, or costing you a lot of money in extra bandwidth costs. The reason I say this is because your home page is 2.25MB (mainly due to the Flash), your gifts for him page is 1.75MB, your gadgets page is 1.7 MB, your Must haves page is 2.15MB (mainly due to large images that are being downloaded and then browser shrunk (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=596640)). With extra visitors, at best, your website will annoy visitors because of its slow loading, at worst your website might grind to a halt or cost you a lot of money in bandwidth fines (for going over your bandwidth limit) at your host.

Don't worry so much about the German hosting thing, it looks like your web suppliers may have addressed this issue (at least in Google) since you are appearing in the Google 'pages from the UK' results (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=mygiftstreet.com&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB). It is worth checking whether this is the case with yahoo and msn live too.

[thesuperhero]

Emma,

Yes, SEO will help. Like what they mentioned above. But your ecommerce software (that runs PHP from what I can see) need to support SEO friendly URL. From example, it will translate
ht ttp:// mygiftstreet. com/cms . php ? pageid=14 to something like
ht ttp:// mygiftstreet. com/gift-for-him/

This has more meaning to search engine while indexing your site.

Also, I think since Christmas is so near, you may not have the time to make it to gain traffic with SEO. So for immediate results that draw traffic to your site for Christmas sales hit will be printing flyers and distribute it all around in your neighbourhood. I'm not sure this is do-able in your country.

For the loading speed problem, it is because the product photos are being load as original picture, which is the full size. Some software like the one I have will create smaller thumbnails. Only when you click into it, it will load the bigger one. Also, it will auto-resize.

[tagnum]

if you go for online marketing, you may not have enough time to do proper SEO before xmas, try PPC instead.

[Isabella_Smith]

Hi,
The site is too Lengthy, I don't know may be my pc is slow.
Well, It's better to go with ppc for a good revenue. Besides, you may start some marketing as well, such as marketing on myspace, facebook and etc. You can generate a good traffic from there, these sites are relevant for your product.

[luckyg]

give the customer option to view all images instead fo scrollign through pages.

my pet hate!

[stacks]

Love the look and feel of the site! Load times are fine for me so either the other people had rubbish connections or old PC's. Yes it could probably do with some tweaking to get times down slightly but I dont think it's going to lose you too many customers.

By the way, I run a site selling similar things, we started in June and business has been awful so I sugget you give up now and close the site ;o)

Actually, we think we have made a good start and have some big plans over the next 12 months. I know we are in direct competition but if you would like to share any analytical information to use as a comparison then drop me a PM.

Did you do all the site design, images and flash yourself or did you get someone in? it's an area on my site that we are going to work on because although we are getting sales I think we look a bit bland and need jazzing up a bit.

Best of luck (but not too much!)

[FunkyBears]

Hi Emma
Sent you a PM your contact number seems incorrect?
Paul

[oldeagleeye]

Sorry OP but I think your site is far too pink and dare I say boring. You really ought to take a look around at what competitors are offering before you spend any money on marketing your web site

I recently did a very quick look at sites looking for a promotional gift. One had credit card usb drives at less than £5 quid trade and that includes printing of a logo. Any logo or picture. There are mobile phone watches and mp3 players which are a fraction of what they used to be and rather stylish too.

An ashtray in the shape of a fire bucket don't hack it I am afraid and as for that boring string of cards on the mens section, Why isn't all that space working for you. You can get a casino in a box now that retails at about £15 quid complete with full size blackjack and poker cloth included. People are also into bar tricks these days. Unless I missed them I didn't see any on your site.

You want must have male gizmos. Take a look at Serifs little brothers site Gizmos.com or even Maplin and when you get new products optimse the pics as several posters have said.

Afraid your report has to be marked "must try harder" on this one OP - but never mind. If you can't get it all done by Christmas the Easter Bunnies will be out soon afterwards. Rob

Now wheres that voice activated Darlek I bought my grandson for Xmas and I have decided to keep just in case any Evangilists come knocking when I am eating me Sunday lunch.

[ginnyscards]

Welcome to the forum. I have taken a look at your website and I have to say I like it and the products. I wish you success and I hope you find the forum as helpful as I have. x

[boho]

My instinct would be that your site is more aimed at ladies shopping for gifts for themselves and others than men, so its pink girlyness appeals to me and there are lots of really nice products that I like - though I would check your retail prices against your competitors, iwoot, firebox, 1770, etc as I noticed items which are on those sites and which I would probably go back to if your prices didn't match up as I've had a good service from them in the past.

I had no problem with load time on my pc, but my pc is quite quick, though I'm in the stick and my broadband connection is not always that fast, so I think some of those struggling must be on much older pc's.

I would give customers the option to show all, I hate scrolling through pages and I rarely have the time to just surf through a site, I need to be able to do a quick scroll down and see everything.

Odd couple of typos' CORRESPONDENTS instead of correspondence on your about us page.

It is a saturated market and that does mean you reall need to be able to market yourself based on a specific niche, so its worth taking some time to identify your target audience and how you can make yourself different from your competitors.

Good luck with the site - its bookmarked on my pc anyway :)

[Farid]

Hi ,

The problem is that most visitors of online stores will give up and leave if they cannot find the information they are looking for within a few minutes

May I suggest using Proactive 24/7 Live chat and help service for your online store . It helps to Inteact with every single website visitor .This system is being used by more than 5000 online retailers in USA , and can assist you to increase the sales revenue.

Take a look at web-secretary(dot)com , where you can try it completey free for 2 weeks ,without any obligation

Thanks
Farid