Coud you guys take a look? 2

[aTrrak]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but here goes:
I would very much appreciate it if anyone could take a look at

http://www.bebimi.com

and tell me some impressions and share some thoughts. Don't be gentle; lay it on me as hard as possible, but bear in mind that it's nowhere near finished!
It's still under construction as we're still in the process of contracting more vendors who deal in jewelry and diamonds and such, but I'd like to hear some opinions regarding the site. Thanks!

 

[aTrrak]

Well, we'd like to think that our affiliates are among the leading ones in this market and this is why we've chosen them. Bebimi's aim is indeed meant to help you to make the right decision considering your budget and needs.
The idea behind bebimi.com is to bring all the offers in one place so that someone interested can best choice.

 

[Sympology]

Just a quick one from a design front. Are these stock photo's? Just a niggle but Silver / Platinium on white back ground, a no no in my book. Otherwise seems ok to me.

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[aTrrak]

Hmm, that bad huh? Well in this case I suppose we should do something about the photos on bebimi.com since you're saying they're not so good.
Thanks for the tip, and thanks for the time you've taken to give bebimi a look!

 

[Seth13]

I for one, really like your main picture. It looks like a real professional image and is sending the right message. Yet, I think you could make the images from your results page, a little more clear because they look a little dim right now. What do you think?

 

[skiflyer]

Well, I'm running firefox, and neither the "Women's" or "Watches and Accessories" links go anywhere for me.

(Women's ever... watches & accessories separately do work for me from the sitemap)

Outside those two broken links, my biggest gripe about the site is it's too easy to leave it without knowing I'm about to leave it. My advice would be to setup your links such that if you're going to leave the page they open a new window so that it's easy to get back to you.

Also, certain pages take some time to load, and I'm on a T3 connection here, so I'm not sure of the details, if this is PHP code not performing well, your host being slow or whatnot... but I notice the

http://bebimi.com/diamonds.htm

takes a few seconds to load, but it's only 23.16KB in size.

On the top row of links (I believe it's an image map?) if I click on the rightmost separator (the cross) it takes me to a link (specifically the gifts link to the left of the separator), but none of the other separators are active links, my feeling is none of them should be.

Less tables, more CSS... I have a feeling this would greatly speed up the feel of your site, especially in Gecko based browsers.

Also, plenty of praise for the site... it looks good and clean, easy to move around. Very professional, and plenty of information.

 

[aTrrak]

OK, I know about those links, been meaning to get that fixed. thanks for reminding me
You're also right about the fact that it's pretty easy to leave the site, we should do something about that as well so thanks for your suggestion!
I think the slowness you're talking about is because of the server... we'll change that soon enough.
I know, I know, USE CSS - will do!
Thanks you for this very documented post, I really appreciate your help on this and I hope you'll keep criticizing my site! Constructive criticism of course

 

[Seth13]

I went on

http://bebimi.com/diamonds.htm

and it seems that skiflyer is right. This page takes too long to load but I think I know where the problems is. I noticed the loading of a script or something similar immediately as you open the page. This script is loaded from another website so this could be the cause for a slow loading. Just my 2 cents ...
Also, you really have to set the target "blank" to all those links from the affiliates list and you might wanna get rid of the ".com" termination string. It would make the list look nicer.

 

[GlenJohnson]

I clicked on the above link, and the site loaded in less than 3 seconds. Don't have a problem with that. I'm using IE6, what's everyone else using?

Glen A. Johnson
To get the best answers to your questions, check out faq950-5848
If you're from the Chicago land area, check out Tek-Tips in Chicago IL

 

[Seth13]

Glen,I think that 3 seconds is more than enough for a lot of people to quit

http://www.bebimi.com

and go back to google page or whateven page they came from.
BTW: I am using FireFox 1.0.4

 

[aTrrak]

Well, the link seems to be loading ok, although I tend to agree with Seth. People don't have too much patience and may chose to leave bebimi if we don't do something about those load times.
Also, thanks Seth for the suggestion regarding the links. Perhaps we should do that and remove the .com

 

[Seth13]

The PHP for your pages with the amazon ads is a little odd. I know that

http://www.bebimi.com

is still in progress, but I'd suggest one of a couple things. Either, take out some of the options on the left, or add a product to them. If something comes up without a result I'd suggest taking it out as an option.

 

[GlenJohnson]

One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. It's loaded. Still don't have a problem with that.

Glen A. Johnson
If you're from the Illinois, Wisconsin or Florida area, check out Tek-Tips in Chicago IL
To get the best answers to your questions, check out faq950-5848

 

[aTrrak]

I suppose that this isn't as big a problem as I thought. This is good since changing servers and so on wasn't one of our priorities here at bebimi.

 

[Seth13]

It can't be considered a real problem but you could try and change your bebimi.com OS. Try switching to Linux. It's faster.

 

[Seth13]

Recently I read a couple of marketing tips and the general idea was that if one optimizes his or her website to load more rapidly, he or she will unquestionably get more visitors who will stay longer on the website.

http://www.bebimi.com

is usually a fast loading website so I think you should try and optimize your diamonds page too. This way you will get the most out of it. Just my 2 cents...

 

[skiflyer]

Speeding the site up:

1) Trash the tables for CSS where applicable

2) if that page is dynamically generated, consider caching software, or consider no longer dynamically caching it

3) Make sure your server is using HTTP compression (this should be done regardless of size as you will save a fortune in bandwidth over time)

4) Tune your webserver, IIS or apache, either one can hum quite nicely when properly tuned. Don't know how, find someone who days, pay them, it shouldn't take them much more than an hour.

5) If you use ASP or PHP or JSP make sure those setups are tuned, (And don't use ASP while you're at it )

6) And probably the single most important thing in regards to speed, if you have a database backend, make sure it is properly configured, tuned and indexed