This is my existing website www.kitchenfitters.ie, fairly basic. I am updating this site to an e-commerce website where people can purchase everything from the kitchen to the wine bottle opener. I would like some feedback on how people would design such a site and how best to promote it in a cost effective way via the web. Also if there are any other ways that I could get my site noticed and attract customers to it this would be greatly received information too. Thanks

Not bad at all... A bit on the bland side but good clean design.

After a quick look though one very important thing to do -

Sort out the "Alt" attributes for your images. Especially for your menu items. Someone who is blind or has images turned off will not be able to use the menu. And thus your site. At the minute they are blank so you obviously put them in and then didn't go any further...

And also the ad on the right hand side... why is it stretched? Why not just edit the image to fit the space that you want it to? Looks like a fairly easy image to modify...?

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My Blog thing!

Unfortunately I am not the web-designer. If I want to get the website html coding from him what should I ask him for. As for the ad, yeah just dropped that in last night and seen that it was too long. Any ideas for driving traffic to that site? The work is tightening up and the cash is a bit low for advertising.

OK a couple of things...

The technical ones first... Kitchen Fitters - Sections - That's the link to your homepage... not very good... and the title of that page is "Kitchen Fitters - Sections". And that's crap and non descriptive and no-one is going to click on it in google or whatever.

Then if you click on flooring for example, this is the title - "Kitchen Fitters - Section Items". That doesn't mention flooring at all so again no-one is going to click on it. And I can only see the word flooring twice in there and that's one of your major sections! so its more than likely going to be poorly ranked in google.

But Since you're going to be changing platform I'm sure they're going to be resolved, so I wont go on with those.

Driving traffic to your site can be a difficult task. If you search google with the word kitchens (which nobody does by the way.) and pages from Ireland, I can't see your site at all in the first few pages.

Luckily enough if you search Kitchen Fitters its the top results so that's good.

How many unique vistors does your site get in say a month? Do you know how they found your site? Applications like google webmaster tools and hittail can help immensly for finding out how people found your site, and where the referrals are coming from... If you find that out you can then tailor your content more towards that information.

A more realistic search would be something like "new kitchens dublin" or something similar. You should try and tailor your content to deal with those kinds of keywords.

Thanks for the info. So are you saying that in each url like say section kitchens that in the url for that page the web designer should have the word kitchens. See this is the url for the kitchen section when you move from the home page http://www.kitchenfitters.ie/html/co...?sectionid=164 so where he has the http://www.kitchenfitters.ie/html/(in here should we have)kitchen collection or kitchenfitterskitchencollection.aspx?sectionid=164 . Do you get my meaning. Would you be inclined to say that the person who designed this site might be inexperienced or just lazy?

Have you considered integrating a blog? You could provide case studies on interesting jobs, tips and tricks, how to's etc. Basically try to position yourself as the expert with a community touch! - This should do nicely for long tail keywords in search engines.

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Geansai Gorm | Web Design Ireland | Free CSS Menus | Canavan Disease

Thanks! So by saying integrating a blog, do you mean my website should have a blog section? And long-tail keywords what is meant by these. Thanks

I was going to suggest this too... Very good idea. If people read some articles then they will also browse around.

In the case of your designer... I don't want to get anyone into trouble. It might be a limitation of the platform that you're using that the URL's look bad.

Take flooring for example - I think i might work best if the link was something like this? I would avoid sectionid and stuff like that if at all possible.

http://www.kitchenfitters.ie/flooring

And then the title of that page could be something like "Kitchen Fitters > Flooring" or "Kitchen Fitters - Dublin Kitchens - Flooring". And then the page might have a few more things to do with flooring like tips on laying flooring or what your process is etc. Things that people can link to and thus drive traffic towards you.

When you do a search in google for say DVD shops in Dublin do you search for "DVD"...? Nope you search for DVD retail shops dublin or something like that.

If you watch the following demo video here it will explain it alot better than I can... HitTail - Demo and no I'm not connected to hittail in any way and am not recommending their product. Its a handy video to get to understand how the long tail works.

I'm not saying it should or should not have a blog... All I'm say is if you had a blog and you created an article (let's say a case study on a recent kitchen you fitted) - that article is going to contain keywords that will show up in search engines for longtail keywords. Then people might link to you about a tip you gave or an article, and you gain a back link.

Courtesy of Google