Newbie needs help...Please review my site...

This is it...

URL

Please be gentle, but honest...I am teachable!

I am "trying" to use a Miva site with the SEK module. Any and all help would be appreciated.

(Believe it or not, I am making a little $$ with this site, even in the mess it is in! :grin: )

Great to see that you are making money with the website!

You have a very nice start here, and you can turn it into something larger. Here are my personal recommendations of things that can be done in the next two weeks to really give your site a shot in the arm! These changes may already be easy to do with Miva, but I am not certain.

First, make a seperate page for each dress. I understand why you were going the way you were - grouping the pictures by <B>type of dress</b>, but it makes the page incredibly heavy and hard to navigate. Instead, try this:

Pick a MAIN dress for each category, for instance in the Ball Gowns collection it might be the gorgeous Elleyana Diamond #2020. Now, build a page that focuses <B>specifically</b> on that dress alone, complete with ordering info and a "Buy Now" button.

Now that there is only one dress on the page, sit and think of a good, convincing story about your daughter who wore this to her Senior Prom and won the Prom Queen title because of the gorgeous dress. Make sure to emphasize how shocked people were to find out the price of such a regal looking <B>ball gown</b>! Make sure that in this story, you use the word <B>"ball gown"</b> at least 5 times, and try and use the plural form <B>"ball gowns" as many times as possible as well</b>.

Next, create pages for all of the other Ball Gown dresses, but forget about the <B>story idea</b> for these pages. Just make one page, put one dress, and put ordering info.

Finally (the tricky part!) - use your paint program to make thumbnails of the dresses. Thumbnails are <B>tiny images that are from 1/5th to 1/10th the size of the original image.</b> What you want to do now is create navigation around these tiny images. On the main "Ball Gowns" page, where you have that one Elleyana Diamond #2020 as the <B>Feature Item</b>, end the page here with links to the other ball gowns on their own individual pages, but use the thumbnails to give the users an idea of what links they are clicking on.

I have some additional comments, but this will keep you busy for a while! This will help add to your search engine prominence and provide a simpler navigation for your users, IMO.

The opening page is a bit bland - you might want to add a few graphocs to display your wares to entice people to Enter the site. A good start. Good luck with it.

Nick

Does anybody know how well google is indexing/rating these dynamic sites (ie: Miva sites)?

Also, will I get into trouble with Google by using the SEK module, which basically creates a mirror image of my site?

Thanks for help! :grin:

As far as I know, Google has trouble with sites that pass more than two variables, but I could be mistaken. It is one reason my partner and I decided to switch from a shopping cart (like Miva) to straight web-pages with no engine.

However, that doesn't mean that you can't use Miva. Here is how you structure your pages so that Google can find them, and how to trick Google into not seeing those pesky variables:

Take a sample page that came from the Miva engine, the page for <B>Ball Gowns</b> once again:

"http://www.gownsbysimpleelegance.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SE&Category_Code=BG"

Yeah, that's kinda long, isn't it? Not much chance of Google picking that up, simply because it doesn't know which variables to fill in.

Now, let's make it easier for Google.

In your main website directory ("http://www.yoursite.com/"), create a file named "ball_gowns.php" and put this inside of it:



<?php
require ("http://www.gownsbysimpleelegance.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SE&Category_Code=BG") or die ("SEO Chat Rules!");
?>


And that's it. Now, if your webhost supports PHP (most do), when you go to "www.gownsbysimpleelegance.com/ball_gowns.php", it should point directly to the Miva page, but the variables won't show up in the title bar.


As far as getting in trouble with Google, I doubt that very much. Their algorithm (sp?) automatically detects the same content served by the same host, and removes one of the references.

You appear to have a PageRank of 3/10 which isn't too bad so maybe there is hope for your site.

Nick

This isn't my first site.

That is almost correct before July 2003. We announced in November 2002 that it was more than one ampersand in the url that caused the problem but installing the OpenUI solved the problem. More than one ampersand was allowed starting in July 2003.
That is a good workaround, but there is a module available that integrates .htaccess and miva merchant producing urls that appear static. It is really good. HTH

Jason