How does your Home Page Stand Up?

The homepage of your jewelry business website is often the landing page and is critical to the success of your online business. When potential customers land on this page, you have just a few seconds to capture their interest. This page will be a giant factor in your conversion rate which is the ratio of visitors that respond to your goal action. This goal action can be subscribing to your newsletter, ordering your products or simply calling you to discuss a product or service.

To be successful your homepage needs to contain certain elements...and all are important for that mix of esthetic beauty, marketing success, search engine rankings, and ultimately achieve your goals.

Here are 3 things to consider today (more to come)

1. Color The color you choose for your jewelry website can have a big effect on your visitors. The type of site you have should be a factor in the colors you choose. There are essentially two types of colors - cool and warm. A lot of research has been done on the psychology of color. For example, warm colors like yellows, reds and organ bring out feelings of excitement, energy and happiness. Cool colors like browns, blues and greens can make you feel relaxed, calm and assured. Take some time to research whether your chosen colors will help achieve the appropriate feeling (confidence? trust? excitement?) for your jewelry web site. Here's a start: Color Psychology

2. Clutter

Think how you feel when you walk into a store that's messy and cluttered - it doesn't exactly make you feel confident, does it? Your website is the same - you don't want it look like a cluttered, junk-filled mess. Keep it clean, simple, consistent and easy to follow.

3. Header

When a visitor hits your page (through your well executed search engine optimization) you have just a few seconds to "capture" your visitor's attention and make him want to know more about you and your products/services. The header should outline in a few words the benefits for the visitor to stay longer.

Your success in the step can be assessed through your web site analytics. (You do analyze your site's activity, don't you?) Take a look at the page's "bounce rate". If visitors are visiting a page and immediately leaving without looking further into what you have to offer - they have "bounced" off the page to find what they're looking for somewhere else.

What makes a jewelry website different?

We've been specializing in websites for the Jewelry trade for some time now and I thought it would be good to sit back and try to define what makes a jewelry trade website different from the ordinary eCommerce website selling books or batteries or other household products.

First - Jewelers (and I'm talking about the people - not large jewelry companies that are basically resellers of other jewelry designer's pieces) are at heart, I believe, artists. They love beautiful things but most of all beautiful jewelry.

So while jewelry websites must be functional from an eCommerce standpoint, they must also be beautiful to satisfy the website owner's hunger for beauty above-all. That's why so many unsuccessful websites are developed using "Flash" technology which offers the ability to create a beautiful site that may not drive traffic from Search Engines.

So the challenge to the jewelry website developer is to create a jewelry trade web site that is not only esthetically beautiful but functional, constructed in such a way to achieve search engine ranking success but focused on generating sales not just web visitors who stop by and leave.