Website Progress - What do you guys think??

[SeanyHang]

A month ago, me and some buddies were browsing through a few of those cool random-product sites (sites that are typically catalog-style with affiliate products). It was a chill-little way to waste time but when all was said and done, that's all it was - a waste of time. You see, most of the gadgets and products on these sites cost hundreds - if not thousands (occasionally hundreds of thousands) of dollars and I suspected many people just like us, only went on the site to see the cool stuff out there.
That's when one of my friends said "Ya know it'd be cool to have a site just like this that actually had stuff I could afford..there'd be so many things I'd get."......BOOOOMMM..Wonderful idea.

I listened to Zendolphins conference call about how he told someone to give their competition a call and essentially learn from them. So.. I did just that (except with email) and asked an owner of a huge site that I'd imagine would be my competition about some of his tactics and which products convert the most for him.

He said that the cheaper products are usually the ones that convert - BINGO (just as I suspected).

SO.. I decided to Rip, Pivot and Jam his site and turn it into something of my own... I'm essentially taking his basic idea but I'm the "discount version" -if you will- along with slight differences that make my site a bit cooler (I think).

I went ahead and bought hosting and a wordpress theme that I intended to tweak and make better... but my lack of programming skills (which I'm now working on) hindered me, so I decided to hire an Indian firm off of eLance. They wanted me to pay $1200.. but everything that I had read about elance and asian firms said that you REALLY need to negotiate and play some hardball to get a deal... SO negotiate I did, and got them to work on my site for $400 along with my promise that IF I like their work I will consider hiring them first the next time that I need work done...


All this being said- They said that they have accomplished everything that I wanted done besides an endless scroll feature which my theme apparently wouldn't support (I'm not happy about this but I'm pushing onward for now).
So now before I pay them and part ways I want to make sure everything is ok for now...


The feedback site (that they'll upload for me once I pay) is Home - 50 or LESS (the sites actual name is fiftyorless.com but at the moment it dosen't look like this).

Keep in mind that I'm going to need to upload different products to the product pages (such as guys and girls) so for now they're fairly blank... I'm also going to write a product review for every product, so they all get that cool little dropdown feature (which I had them put in).

Other things I believe need tweaking:
-Get rid of the shopping cart and place the social media widget there.
-Obviously get a logo (that spans from the left, right to where the widgets start)
-more products on the front page (I can do this)
-Blog posts (I can do this)
-Maybe banners on the product pages?


This is essentially the bare version of what the site will be - I intend to make it better as I go along, but want to promote it ASAP..

What do you guys think???

 

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[davedev]

Awesome stuff. I like the layout. On first impression as a user the only thing I'd ask for is a "back to top" button. But I'd assume that'll be implemented after the endless scroll feature is implemented. (seems they'd go hand in hand).

The product layout reminds me of https://svpply.com/ I like the large images and expanding box with reviews. Pretty slick.

As for the site design, I like it, just needs a tiny splash of color, something a bit bolder than the burnished orange color you're using. (View Details). But this is nitpicking so ignore that part.

I am a student of Web Development myself, new to this whole thing, but those are a few things that came to mind when I checked out the site.

Best of luck.

 

[stevecov]

I really like the site and really like the concept. $50 or less seems like you have nailed the perfect price points.

You are hitting a market where in my opinion people are going in not knowing what they want. If you can explore more featured products, maybe special timed deals it can help me browse the site. I would take a look through your homepage but the specific categories have way to many pages and I need an easier way to explore my interests.

I would like to see what are the top products, what other people are buying etc.

All just my opinion but a great concept that seems like it has been well thought out.

Good luck.

 

[SeanyHang]

I would like to see what are the top products, what other people are buying etc.

Hmmm you brought up a good point that which was an idea I was playing with but haven't implemented.. I will possibly add a slider at the top that will showcase all 4-5 top products.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

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[dave6203]

Hey looks like its coming along. Lots of neat stuff. Good for taking action and tweaking the site as you go. Watched a video of the bumper balls on youtube and it cracked me up. The kids are having a blast in the video. I could imagine two drunk people in them that would be hilarious.

 

[Thriftypreneur]

It looks very similar to http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/ These types of sites have become pretty popular over the last year or so.

I like the idea behind these stores and I think yours is starting out nicely, but I'd be looking to further define myself from the rest of the pack. Either through branding, promotional gimmicks, or something else that makes your site unique from the rest (price point probably won't be enough).

Look forward to seeing how you progress with this. Best of luck.

 

[AmyQ]

Nice look and feel. Nice products and price point.

Only problem I had was with your shopping cart. When I tried to buy something it took me to Amazon and showed me that I could get the same product cheaper from another seller.

 

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[Clayton]

If you're happy with your developers, could you consider sharing their contact info? Good quality outsourced development is in high demand.

 

[Tom.V]

Nice look and feel. Nice products and price point.

Only problem I had was with your shopping cart. When I tried to buy something it took me to Amazon and showed me that I could get the same product cheaper from another seller.

The OP said he is replicating a catalog of affiliate products, via Amazon apparently. That said, I don't see the point of the shopping cart other than hopefully getting users to try to fill it.

It's nice and clean. Is it a responsive layout? For something like this, I'd make damn sure it is. Definitely don't want to miss out on mobile/tablet shoppers.

Either way, simple and solid idea. Best of luck to you.

 

[goodfella]

Only problem I had was with your shopping cart. When I tried to buy something it took me to Amazon and showed me that I could get the same product cheaper from another seller.

That's not actually much of a problem even if the customer decides to buy the cheaper version because you'll still get the commission for that product and any other product.

 

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[SeanyHang]

If you're happy with your developers, could you consider sharing their contact info? Good quality outsourced development is in high demand.

I'm not to sure I would recommend the developmental team working on this project. The site looks good mostly due to the fact that I didn't spend a dime until I shopped around for a theme that I really liked. After that I tried to make sure that each product was completely different than the product next to it, in order to give it that "cool" factor (for instance, I think I have about 3 different backpacks on the site... but by the time you see the second one, you will have already seen 25-30 different products).

I hired the team mostly in part so they could make the site load faster, and give me an endless scroll.... They have yet to give me the endless scroll which is more than annoying. I may close the project with them (They have tweaked the site a bit more since I last showed it on here) and take what they give me to another developer who can figure out how to implement an infinite scroll feature.

 

[jgsketch]

Nice idea and site. I really like that theme. It has a ton of features and layouts built into it. I use it for a site I own. However, i never bothered using it for Affiliate products as I could not get a picture to link directly to Amazon like you have, always to the product detail page on my site. Is that a feature that you had them program in? Do you have to download the pictures for all your products in order to list them? Just curious.

I would also suggest adding some color. The options built into the theme allow you to make alot of different color changes easily. I would check them out before asking your programmers. Good luck.

 

[Headhunter]

Looks awesome , keep rockin

 

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[SeanyHang]

I could not get a picture to link directly to Amazon like you have, always to the product detail page on my site. Is that a feature that you had them program in?

Yup! besides the endless scroll that was the other feature I felt the site absolutely needed because it would seem (I didn't check any analytics.. this is just an assumption based on what a lot of the guys on the forum who make big money say) that the more pages I had the customer go through to get to Amazon (which is the end goal-if I can get them to Amazon and they buy ANYTHING regardless if it was my product or not, I get commission) the more the conversion rate would drop off.

I plan on adding a bit of color and a better logo in the very near future.. I just wanted to get the main features put in there first. Also I finally heard back from my developer and they said that an infinite scroll could not be implemented into the site because of some hardcoding (I'm super new to anything web dev/design related so I had to look up what that even meant). That kind of pissed me off just because I've wasted so much time waiting for these guys to finish the site, and they told me infinite scroll would be easy to do. I told them that it was unacceptable and they're going to give me a discount (you can really use the fact that these teams desperately want good feedback from their clients to your advantage). So at the end I ended up saving an addition $100..

For the most part I've been happy with what they've done and the infinite scroll mishap may have just been a fluke on their side - If anyone still wants their information just so they could be a possible candidate for future webdesign endeavors, feel free to PM me.

 

[jgsketch]

Thanks for the reply. I've heard programmers use that line before. The funny thing is, they had to "hard code" the featured image to link directly to amazon. Sounds like they just could not figure out how to disable the pagination and loop. I would think that would be the easy part. The hard part would be programming the page to load one set at a time while you scroll, instead of loading an entire page of hundreds of products.

It's frustrating trying to find a good programmer. I have one now, but a bit pricy can cannot do design work. They do quality programming work though. So I only use them out of frustration, after I've spent a day trying to figure out one little issue. lol.

 

[zoborg]

If you're happy with your developers, could you consider sharing their contact info? Good quality outsourced development is in high demand.

Clayton - I can personally recommend some dev's in Bulgaria - have used a few times and really impressed - I won't say they are the cheapest but you do get what you pay for. As a dev myself its pretty easy to know when people are good or not and 95% of the time outsourced dev's dont know there stuff. PM me if you want a intro

 

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[zoborg]

Thanks for the reply. I've heard programmers use that line before. The funny thing is, they had to "hard code" the featured image to link directly to amazon. Sounds like they just could not figure out how to disable the pagination and loop. I would think that would be the easy part. The hard part would be programming the page to load one set at a time while you scroll, instead of loading an entire page of hundreds of products.

It's frustrating trying to find a good programmer. I have one now, but a bit pricy can cannot do design work. They do quality programming work though. So I only use them out of frustration, after I've spent a day trying to figure out one little issue. lol.

Dev + design are sadly 2 totally different disciplines.. someone that claims to be good at both is likely to be crap at both.

 

[SeanyHang]

Dev + design are sadly 2 totally different disciplines.. someone that claims to be good at both is likely to be crap at both.

This is something that as a non-techy, I had no idea about for quite a while. You mentioned that you were a developer yourself? Would you agree with what my dev team said then- that it's "near-impossible" to add an infinite scroll feature when the hardcoding of the theme doesn't allow it?

 

[zoborg]

When you say "infinite scroll" you mean like google images or Pinterest? e.g. you get to the bottom of the page and more products/photo's are dynamically loaded?

Assuming that is correct - its far from impossible (otherwise it would not have been done before), however in my opinion (I'm more back end then front end which once again is a different discipline)... its totally possible - that said its also not trivial either, pagination is far easier and the dev's probably don't know how to do infinite scroll (and even if they did I bet they would not do it so that it works on all browsers).

If I were the dev's I would have said something along the lines of - "Yes it can be done, however it would cost a lot of dev hours and are you sure the benefit of which would be worth the cost"...

Personally I don't like tech teams saying things are impossible - better to be honest and say it can be done we don't know how but can try, but it will cost you - then at least you can make the decision..

All that said and done - I also would question why do you need a infinite scrolls? Pagination is still widely accepted at least for now.

 

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[SeanyHang]

When you say "infinite scroll" you mean like google images or Pinterest? e.g. you get to the bottom of the page and more products/photo's are dynamically loaded?

Assuming that is correct - its far from impossible (otherwise it would not have been done before), however in my opinion (I'm more back end then front end which once again is a different discipline)... its totally possible - that said its also not trivial either, pagination is far easier and the dev's probably don't know how to do infinite scroll (and even if they did I bet they would not do it so that it works on all browsers).

If I were the dev's I would have said something along the lines of - "Yes it can be done, however it would cost a lot of dev hours and are you sure the benefit of which would be worth the cost"...

Personally I don't like tech teams saying things are impossible - better to be honest and say it can be done we don't know how but can try, but it will cost you - then at least you can make the decision..

All that said and done - I also would question why do you need a infinite scrolls? Pagination is still widely accepted at least for now.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean by infinite scroll! And that's what I figured as well - I think I'm going to go ahead and try to outsource the product that they give me again to have the infinite scroll.

As for needing infinite scroll - you're right, maybe I don't NEED it, but I feel that in order to compete with other sites that are similar I'm going to want it.

 

[stephanduq]

jScroll - a jQuery Plugin for Infinite Scrolling / Lazy Loading Here is the plugin you would most likely want to use. Endless scroll is damn easy, especially when you use a framework that already has build in pagination.

Edit: I can't believe the devs said this is impossible. This is really simple stuff for a semi up to date junior frontend programmer....

 

[zoborg]

Great reply by stephanduq for a plugin (although your dev team should have researched this).

you're right, maybe I don't NEED it, but I feel that in order to compete with other sites that are similar I'm going to want it.

I must question this statement - if your customers are buying because you have the latest tech solution you have a big problem... surely you can differentiate in some other way? I cannot see why a customer would choose your competitor over you JUST because they have infinite scroll... beat them on service or some other USP!

 

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[stephanduq]

I saw that the website was build on the wordpress engine. And for wordpress there is this, no coding even needed. (And saved this one for my own project) . Although you might need to tinker in the code to get it working perfectly with this theme

WordPress › Infinite-Scroll « WordPress Plugins

Infinite scrolls keep people engaged with your site. Just look at sites like 9gag.com, because the scrolling never stops you can keep scrolling hoping for something good to show up. Humans are very trained to start their next action after the current one has been completed. And infinite scrolls are great at prolonging an action

 

[SeanyHang]

Infinite scrolls keep people engaged with your site. Just look at sites like 9gag.com, because the scrolling never stops you can keep scrolling hoping for something good to show up. Humans are very trained to start their next action after the current one has been completed. And infinite scrolls are great at prolonging an action

Exactly.
Unfortunately I tried using that plugin when I first got the theme to no avail, which was around the time that I started looking for the developers. They said that they couldn't use the plugin either. There's got to be a solution.

 

[stephanduq]

Exactly.
Unfortunately I tried using that plugin when I first got the theme to no avail, which was around the time that I started looking for the developers. They said that they couldn't use the plugin either. There's got to be a solution.

You or the dev's should look at the theme and check how the pagination is set up. I would expect that the pagination is different from the normal wordpress theme, so the theme and plugging don't understand eachother. Most likely the solution is nothing more then changing the selector name in the plugin.

 

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