E-Commerce Website Evaluation Report

The E-Commerce site chosen is Arngren.net at first glance of the site the visitors eyes are over the place unable to focus on just one subject of the entire web page. Also upon first view the user may just close the web page and find another place for shopping needs because of how the Arngren site is currently set up. In order to get potential customers Arngren should make better use of their Meta and title tags. By changing the title tags from the extremely long title tag currently used more Internet web searchers will find their website. From going from <title> over 20 words</title> to <title> Arngren Products</title> will help immensely. The Meta tags for their keywords should also be shortened down and not includes their web address. Listing their best sellers in their keywords would be a better option that using over 40 keywords; for example; <Meta name=”keywords” content=” Electronics, Gadgets, TV, DVD, ATV, Radio, moped, jeep, toys, aquarium, electric.”>. Meta tags do not need to be stuffed with keywords. In most cases one instance of the keyword is enough. The use of too many keywords stuffed into the Meta tags looks spammy.

If two keywords need to be used that are the same the second instance should be in a variation of the first keyword and not a repeat of it. For example TV, Television would work as a variation of the first keyword. Also using an updated PageBuilder would help immensely. The Arngren site does not currently look like it has been updated other than to add a Christmas banner across the bottom of the home page. Making use of alt tags to added images and in the HTML code when the image is called for in the HTML code of the web page will help in describing the images by using unique descriptions found when looking at the image. Making the images the same size, preferably as small as they can be made, without losing any quality in the images would also help this website greatly. The images names should be named accordingly to the pictures, for example if the image is of a scooter than the image could be named scooter.jpg and the alt tag could be scooter and perhaps the color, alt=”red scooter”.

Making use of the W3C Markup Validation Service also would help this website in finding their errors. Currently after using the W3C Markup Validation Service the Arngren website was found to have 559 errors and 13 warnings. Some of the errors found are that the current website has no character encoding meaning that none of the standard sources gave any information on the character encoding labeling and without the encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The validator was also unable to determine parse mode. There is also no DOCTYPE found in the website as well as finding there is no character encoding declared at the document level. Declaring the character encoding in the document itself is recommended from W3C. Reviewing the site in multiple browsers will ensure that visitors are all getting the same experience from the website. By writing clean HTML the site should appear correctly in most browsers even if the HTML has not been validated yet.

Writing the pages in HTML, CSS, and tested in many browsers as possible. Using CSS helps separate the content and will help the pages render and load faster. Looking at the source code for www.ARNGREN.net it is hard to see if they are using any type of e-business model. Even looking directly at the website it is hard to spot the e-business model used if they used anything other than a business template that the site seems to be trying to use as a merchant model. If I were to redesign the Arngren website the first thing I would do would be to remove the entire site from online, place an “Under Construction or Being Remodeled” landing page. I would make the images the same size. Keeping the Index after tidying it up along the left hand side of the page might be an option. A total rebuilding of the website is in order. Perhaps a drop down menu for the Index would work better.

Allowing top sellers to occupy the home page with short descriptions and hyperlinks to the products detail page. I would also incorporate a search so visitors can do a search on the product they are looking for. Using an e-commerce product such as the Shopping Cart Elite clients will feel more secure about purchases. The Shopping Cart Elite uses a virtual proxy firewall on all the sites adding additional online security for the Arngren business. The firewall proxy would block any unsafe visitors from accessing the site as well as detect any suspicious activity that has been directed at the site by allowing or denying access. The Shopping Cart Elite offers price comparison features that would help Arngren stay abreast of their competition.

References

Shopping Cart Elite 2013. (2012). Retrieved from http://ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com/shopping-cart-elite-review.html Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test. (2011). Retrieved from http://browsershots.org/ The W3C Markup Validation Service. (2012). Retrieved from http://validator.w3.org/